Actors: Naseeruddin Shah, Shefali Shetty
Director: Meera Nair, Producer:





There is a new character in Indian cinema who steals the show in Mira Nair`s Monsoon Wedding.

The film has a bevy of outstanding performances from its more established actors - Naseeruddin Shah, Vasundhara Das, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Lilette Dubey and Rajat Kapoor. But it`s Dubey ji, a desi errand boy from the Chandni Chowk area, who steals the show from the typically upper class, westernized south Delhi family that congregates for a daugther`s wedding in the monsoons.

Dubey ji stands out as a sore thumb in the privileged world of New Delhi-walas who inhabit Sabrina Dewan`s script. He`s scrawny, ugly in his thinness and looks totally nondescript. But he`s the guy - the contractor - that the money-walas depend on to put up the ceremonial bedi, the pandal for the dinner reception, the floral decorations along the driveway of the big house, the garland of colored bulbs that light up the garden.

It is the obvious contrariness between the clumsily desi P.K. Dubey (played by Vijay Raaz, a theatre actor from the National School of Drama at New Delhi) and the sophisticated Mr. Lalit Verma (played by Naseeruddin Shah) that gives Mira Nair`s film an exciting edge from the word go.

Mr. Lalit Verma is one of the straightest characters that Naseeruddin Shah may have ever played in a film. On the other hand there is nothing but unexpected angularity in the person of P.K. Dubey. He may not be able to speak English, but with his cell phone, his savvy sense about what makes upper class Delhi tick, and his ability to manage everything within his own time schedule, he is the pillar on which Mr. Lalit Verma`s extended family depends for the ritualistic spectacle that a wedding`s get-together stimulates among baraatis and ladki-wale in the subcontinent.

We are at the girl`s house for four days of the wedding. So far as that is concerned, Monsoon Wedding can be co-related to the fun-filled mood and ambience that was first celebrated by that astounding box-office classic, Hum Aapke Hain Koun. But no two wedding-films could be more dissimilar.The characters that the Nair-Dewan film assembles in the Delhi monsoon are exceptionally original in the context of Indian cinema.

We have the girl`s mother (Lilette Dubey) dashing off to smoke in the bathroom, so that aunts and grand aunts don`t come to know of her smoking. The girl`s pre-teen brother is a rotund character who is interested in cooking and wants to become a chef. The college-going brother is treated like a cipher by his father, which is very characteristic of the contemporary middle-class New Delhi family, in complete contrast to the heroic-mould in which mainstream Hindi cinema casts elder sons and brothers. (Most privileged, college-going, New Delhi sons are, believe me, so pampered that they seem to inspire not an iota of responsibility!)

However, it is the girl herself who comes as a real shocker. No male Indian film director would have dared show what Mira Nair and scriptwriter Sabrina Dewan have done. Played by the beautiful Vasundhara Das (the singer-actress who played Kamal Haasan`s second wife in Hey Ram) the young bride-to-be is having an affair with a married TV anchor, even as her marriage to an NRI engineer from the USA has been finalized. The relationship is explicitly sexual and on the very eve of the wedding the girl still hopes that her lover will leave his wife and elope with her.

Nothing of the sort happens. But it takes a typically nasty Delhi interlude to put an end to the affair. The two are necking in his car in a Delhi garden when the sensuous cascade of the monsoon`s downpour is interrupted by the arrival of a police patrol. With all the coarseness that young lovers regularly suffer from Delhi cops, they are about to be ferreted to the local police thana when the girl drives off in desperation.

The next morning she confesses her secrets to her prospective groom, at a teashop he used to frequent during his student days at the IIT (Indian Institute of Technology). Another surprise erupts upon us. He wants to reject her but doesn`t, confessing his own little thing with Dolores in the States.

What distinguishes Monsoon Wedding from Hum Aapke Hain Koun is the simple fact that amidst the boisterous Punjabi bonhomie of the extended family, the Nair-Dewan narrative begins unveiling the seamier side of the Indian extended family. The family`s friendly father-figure turns out to be an old lecher inclined to corrupt ten year old girls, without so much as outraging his own traditionalized wife!

This exposure of instances of incest and child abuse within educated, middle class Indian families emanates from recent revelations stimulated by Indian feminists and by the honesty with which this social aberration is now gradually finding space in the media.

It provides the film with its chilling climax, as the family`s father-figure (played by Rajat Kapoor) is confronted by Naseeruddin Shah`s simple Mr. Everybody, who insists that he must protect his immediate family and must, therefore, break with the man who had helped them out when they first came, penniless, to Delhi as refugees from west Punjab at the Partition. The message of the tale is that behind every big extended family lie a few unsavory tales.

These and other kaleidoscopic goings-on in the marriage house are filmed with robust vigor and a penchant to enjoy the kitsch - in which context two scenes featuring Kulbhushan Kharbanda are enormously funny.

However, the kaleidoscopic montage is held together by the unexpected theme of another courtship and secret wedding. This it the mid-summer night`s tale of love and marriage between the pandal contractor P.K. Dubey and the young maid at the Lalit Verma house - Alice, a young Christian girl hailing from the tribal (and considerably Christian) area of Chota-Nagpur in Jharkhand.

In her very first film, Salaam Bombay, Mira Nair had done a magnificent job in sketching out the underside of urban India. This resurfaces in Monsoon Wedding through the Dubey-Alice love story and provides for the vigorous comic thread that holds the film`s fragmented structure together. Of course, it is the earthiness and the uninhibited directness of Dubey`s desi mannerisms and diction that injects a rarely seen and hilarious flavor to the film`s brassy and occasionally satirical sense of comedy.

If the director fails on any score it is at the marginal level. She seemed keen to weave in a sense of Delhi the twin-city, her city as she has told us, but this is the only thing she fails to put together effectively. Vignettes of Delhi-New Delhi recur from time to time but these do not coalesce with the rest of the film.

Anil Saari Arora: A poet-journalist, he has published two volumes of poetry in English and worked for thirty years as a film critic, sports writer, columnist and reporter at New Delhi, 1966-96. Hindustan Times, The Indian Express, The Week, Sunday magazine, The Deccan Herald, Link and Mainstream are among the newspapers and magazines he has worked for.