Delightful wedding party
Monsoon Wedding

Stars Naseerruddin Shah, Lillete Dubey, Vasundhara Das. Madman Productions. Rated M. 154 mins.

Reviewer :: PTE Simone Heyer

This movie can only be described as an extravaganza. It is a vibrant delight to the senses – worth seeing if only for the costumes and music.

Set in India, Monsoon Wedding covers the events leading up to a traditional Indian arranged wedding ceremony.

It puts you right among the festivities, alongside the large family that has converged from all corners of the globe. The personalities are many, settings are varied and the script near-to-life. You feel the intense humidity, the frustration of the father, smell the rains, feel the delicate silks and smell the profuse marigolds.

The wedding is between Aditi and Hemant, but the main characters are father Lalit, sister Ria, maid Alice and event coordinator P. K. Dubey. Their lives act as side stories, intertwining for the greater story of the monsoon wedding.

The language jumps between Hindi and English, which is quite amusing in places and makes for an ethnicity-rich plot. It touches on the caste system and shows the richness of Indian culture.

If you’re a lover of a foreign film, you won’t be able to watch this one only once. It’s difficult to find enough adjectives to describe it.

The DVD available has a host of extras – a few different languages, the story of the film’s making and an interview with the director. If you’re buying the movie, it’s worth getting the DVD version.