Monsoon Wedding
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| Monsoon Wedding | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Mira Nair |
| Produced by | Caroline Baron, Mira Nair |
| Written by | Sabrina Dhawan |
| Starring | Naseeruddin Shah Lillete Dubey Shefali Shah Vijay Raaz Tillotama Shome Vasundhara Das |
| Music by | Mychael Danna |
| Cinematography | Declan Quinn |
| Editing by | Allyson C. Johnson |
| Distributed by | Mirabai Films, Inc. (USA) |
| Release date(s) |  30 August 2001 (premiere at Venice Film Festival) 4 January 2002 22 February 2002 (LA and NYC) 1 March 2002 |
| Running time | 114 min |
| Language | English |
| Budget | 7,000,000 (INR) |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Monsoon Wedding is an award-winning 2001 film directed by Mira Nair and written by Sabrina Dhawan, which depicts various romantic entanglements during a traditional Punjabi wedding in Delhi.
Writer Sabrina Dhawan wrote the first draft of the screenplay in a week while she was at Columbia University's MFA film program.[citation needed] Monsoon Wedding earned over $20 million at the box office.[citation needed] Although it is set entirely in New Delhi, the film was an international co-production between companies in India, the United States, Italy, France and Germany.[1]
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[edit] Plot
The film's central story concerns a father, Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah), who is trying to organize an enormous, chaotic, and expensive wedding for his daughter, for whom he has arranged a marriage with a man she has known for only a few weeks. As so often happens in Mira Nair's beloved Punjabi culture, such a wedding means that, for one of the few times each generation, the whole family comes together from all corners of the globe. The bride, Aditi Verma (Vasundhara Das), is nervous as she has been having an affair with her married ex-boss Vikram (Sameer Arya). The film also includes several subplots: Ria Verma (Shefali Shetty), a cousin of the bride, was sexually abused by her uncle, Lalit's brother-in-law and the family's patriarch some years earlier, and finally speaks out to prevent his abuse of another young girl in the family, Aliyah. The wedding contractor PK Dubey (Vijay Raaz) falls in love with the family's maid, Alice (Tillotama Shome. The bride's brother Varun, struggles with his father's disapproval of his longing to be a chef and angst at his inability to satisfy the stereotypes of conventional Indian masculine characteristics, possibly stemming from a struggle to come to terms with the boy's homosexuality. Ayesha (Neha Dubey), the youngest marriageable relative of the bride, flirts with Aditi's cousin Rahul (Randeep Hooda), who has just returned from Melbourne. This is all set within the two days preceding the wedding, predominantly at the Verma's house.
[edit] Music
The film's soundtrack includes a qawwali by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a ghazal by Farida Khanum, a modern song by Sukhwinder, an old Indian song by Rafi, a folk dance song, and a variety of other little pieces. The film includes the song "Aaj Mausam Bada Be-Imaan Hai" by Mohammed Rafi (originally from the 1973 Bollywood movie Loafer), and an Urdu ghazal, "Aaj Jaane Ki Zid Na Karo" ("Don't Be So Stubborn About Leaving Today"), sung by Pakistani artist Farida Khanum.
[edit] Awards
The movie won the Golden Lion, the highest prize at the Venice Film Festival. Mira Nair was the first woman to win this award, and the second Indian (after Satyajit Ray for Aparajito). The film was also nominated for the award for Best Foreign Film at the Golden Globes.
[edit] External links
| Preceded by The Circle |
Golden Lion winner 2001 |
Succeeded by The Magdalene Sisters |
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