20131118: Bollywood Review---Monsoon Wedding

Monsoon Wedding

1. Fundamentals, reception.
1. Indian live action feature length film, 2001, rated R, 114 minutes, drama, romance.
2. IMDB: 7.2/10.0 from 16,441 audience ratings. Spoken word is Hindi with some English; subtitles in English. Estimated budget, 7 million INR.
3. Rotten Tomatoes:  95% on the meter; 84% liked it from 27,112 audience ratings.
4. Netflix: 3.6/5.0 from 738,445 audience ratings.
5. Directed by: Mira Nair.
6. Starring: Naseerruddin Shah as Lalit Verma, Lillete Dubey as Pimmi Verma, Shefali Shetty as Ria Verma, Tillotama Shome as Alice, Vasundhara Das as Aditi Verma, Vijay Raaz as P.K. Dubey, Parvan Drbas as Hemant Rai, Roshan Seth as Mohan Rai, Ishaan Nair as Varun Verma, Kemaya Kidwai as Aliya Verma, Rajat Kapoor as Tej Puri.


2. Setup and Plot
1. Families meet in Delhi for an arranged marriage between Aditi Verma (daughter of Lalit and Pimmi Verma) and Hemant Rai.


2. PK Dubey is the lower class, foul-mouthed, wedding arranger who is interested in the maid, Alice. Lalit is having money trouble; this translates to slow payments to PK.


3. Ria Verma is the unmarried cousin of Aditi, who was abused by Tej Puri when she was younger.


4. Aditi decides to visit her old flame one last time.  That does not work out well, and reminds one of the phrase, 'get a room.'  The police were quite amused.  Aditi tells Hemant about this.  Oh, what a mistake.  He tells her that they will just fit in Houston, Texas, where he currently works.  He is not amused.  He decides to go through with it, and I did not see any particular believable justification for that change of heart.


5. At that point in the movie, I was ready to quit.  Slow, boring, not engaging, no sympathetic characters, except perhaps Lalit and PK.  Then it gets worse; the child molestation issue was not handled well.


6. Happy ending, I guess.  Things turned out well for PK.


3. Conclusions
1. Not as good as Nair's 1997 film, Kama Sutra: a Tale of Love.
2. One line summary: Overrated, laborious.
3. Three stars of five.  That's too high, but I liked the performances listed below.


4. Scores
1. Cinematography: 7/10 Variable.


2. Sound: 8/10 Good most of the time.


3. Acting: 6/10 Cheers to Naseerruddin Shah (Lalit), Tillotama Shome (Alice), Vijay Raaz (PK).  Thumbs down otherwise, particularly for the actors who played the bride and groom.


4. Screenplay: 6/10 Neither engaging nor believable.  The story is rather good, so I would blame the direction, plus poor choices for many of the acting roles.