Re: The Monsoon Wedding 1080p
Carey Jangam
Monsoon Wedding is a 2001 comedy-drama film directed by Mira Nair, written by Sabrina Dhawan, and starring Naseeruddin Shah, Lillete Dubey, Shefali Shah and Vasundhara Das. The story depicts romantic entanglements during a traditional Punjabi Hindu wedding in Delhi. Dhawan wrote the first draft of the screenplay in a week while in Columbia University's MFA film program.[11] Although set entirely in New Delhi, it was internationally co-produced between companies in India, the United States, Italy, France and Germany.
Monsoon Wedding premiered in the March du Film section of the 2001 Cannes Film Festival[12][13] and went on to win the Golden Lion at the Venice International Film Festival and receive a Golden Globe Award nomination while grossing over $30 million internationally at the box office.[10] A musical based on the film premiered on Broadway in April 2014.[14] In 2017, IndieWire named it the 19th best romance of the 21st century.[15]
The film's central story deals with the organisation of an enormous, chaotic, and expensive wedding that is due to take place in a modern Indian family. Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah) and his wife Pimmi (Lillete Dubey) have arranged a marriage for their daughter Aditi (Vasundhara Das) to Hemant Rai (Parvin Dabas). Hemant is the son of a family friend who lives in Texas, and Aditi has only known him for a few weeks. As so often happens in Indian culture, such a wedding means that, for one of the few times in each generation, the extended family comes together from all corners of the globe, bringing its emotional baggage along.
Lalit and Pimmi are helped with the main planning by Pimmi's sister Shashi and her husband C.L (Kulbhushan Kharbanda), who have arrived earlier from Oman. A few days before the engagement, Tej Puri (Rajat Kapoor), Lalit's extremely wealthy brother-in-law, arrives from the U.S.. Tej is married to Lalit's sister and has helped the Verma family regain their financial footing after the Partition of India left them penniless many years ago. Tej offers to pay for Aditi's cousin, Ria Verma (Shefali Shah) to attend university in the U.S., after the family consults him for advice. Ria and her mother live with the Verma family, who took them in after the death of Ria's father. Despite his generous offer, Ria stays away from Tej and is not comfortable in his presence.
Lalit begins experiencing difficulty in paying for the final, smaller aspects of the wedding and is embarrassed when he has to borrow money from friends and colleagues. Meanwhile, P.K. Dubey (Vijay Raaz), the eccentric wedding planner, falls in love with Alice (Tillotama Shome), the Vermas' maid. Ria grows concerned after she witnesses what appears to be Tej grooming a younger relative, ten-year-old Aliya. Aditi's younger brother Varun (Ishan Nair) plans an elaborate dance for the pre-wedding party with another cousin, Ayesha (Neha Dubey), but Lalit worries that his son is becoming too effeminate and plans to send him to boarding school. Dubey's workers see Alice trying on Aditi's wedding jewellery, and the men accuse her of stealing. The incident causes her to become withdrawn from Dubey and he grows depressed.
A few days before the wedding, Aditi sleeps with an old lover, her married boss Vikram; and confesses this to Hemant. The incident only serves as a reminder to Aditi as to why she stopped seeing Vikram. Though he is initially angry, Hemant is glad for her honesty and is confident that they can put it behind them and be happy together. The workers apologize to Alice and she reconciles with Dubey. The night before the ceremony, Varun refuses to dance due to the comments made by his father, and Ayesha performs with the help of Rahul (Randeep Hooda), Pimmi's nephew from Australia. Aditi and Hemant grow closer and they share a few intimate moments, which re-affirms their faith in the marriage. After a night of jokes, drama and dances, Ria catches Tej trying to take Aliya for a drive alone. Ria stops them from driving off and takes Aliya away from him, revealing to Lalit and others that Tej had molested her as a child. Lalit's sister does not believe her, attributing her accusations to her character and unmarried status. Emotionally distraught, Ria leaves.
The next day, Lalit pleads with Ria to return to the wedding, admitting that he can't possibly imagine what she has gone through but also saying that he can't disown Tej, since they are family. Ria is not happy but agrees to return for the sake of Aditi. Hours before the wedding, however, Lalit changes his mind and tells his sister and Tej to leave the wedding and the family home. Tej's wife insists that Ria's accusation was a small matter but Lalit stands his ground.
The Monsoon rains begin as Aditi and Hemant are married in an elaborate wedding, while Dubey and Alice simultaneously wed in a simple ceremony, and later celebrate with the Vermas. Ria moves on from her past life, and is finally able to freely enjoy the festivities.
The soundtrack includes a qawwali by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a ghazal by Farida Khanum, a Punjabi song by Sukhwinder Singh, an old Indian song by Rafi, a folk dance song.The film includes an Urdu ghazal, Aaj Jaane Ki Zid Na Karo (Don't Be So Stubborn About Leaving Today) sung by Pakistani artist Farida Khanum.The song Aaj Mera Ji Karda is recreated by Indian musicians Tanishk Bagchi and Arjunna Harjaie for the film Lucknow Central starring Farhan Akhtar.
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We were now entering the last leg of the wedding Bandobust. The many silk saree shopping trips had finally taken its toll on me; by now I had memorised the number of mannequins on each of the floors in Vijayalakshmi Silks showroom on Sampige Road in Malleshwaram !
But outside the elevator there was total confusion & pandemonium. It seemed like the residents of the entire apartment block were out there - for our rescue ! So near, but yet so far ; our elevator had stalled on the 2nd floor (our destination), is what we learnt from inside our dark interiors.
I promptly got down from the car and opened the car boot. All I had in the boot was about 12 - 14 coconuts and about 2 kgs Bananas (all given by my relatives in Mysore when we went visiting them !).
A big thank you to - Adhamya Chetana who supplied all the steel tumblers, spoons and plates by which we managed to keep all plastics at bay at the wedding, including that dreaded plastic Bisleri bottles. Last, but not the least I should mention Anupama Harish (grooms mother) it was who seeded the thought of making the wedding green and silently worked to plan, coordinate and execute this to perfection.
Monsoon Wedding, which came out in 2001, was an indie darling turned international box office success. Director Mira Nair has been working on a musical adaptation for nearly 15 years. Milan Moudgill hide caption
But even as Nair has continued making films including The Namesake and The Reluctant Fundamentalist, she says she became consumed following the global success of the film with the idea of turning the fictional Varma family wedding into live musical theater.
"I cannot say that I was a huge fan of American musicals," she says. "But when I had the idea to make my film into a musical, I did think 'everyone here flocks to Fiddler on the Roof. Everyone here looks at their stories in different ways on the stage but where are our stories? Where are the brown folk, where's the Verma family?' "
So now, after almost 15 years in development, Monsoon Wedding has opened as a musical at Brooklyn's St. Ann's Warehouse with Nair as director. In a crowded and competitive New York season, the piece is an ambitious experiment in bridging Indian musical styles with a Broadway-style songbook. While this is an off-Broadway production scheduled to run through this summer, the team hopes for a Broadway run. It is not the first such effort.
The first big Indian musical to reach Broadway was Bombay Dreams and it remains the last. Set in the neon spectacle of Bollywood, the 2004 production was a critical and commercial failure that closed in less than one season. It was criticized for, among other things, trying to appeal to a broad audience in a way that felt inauthentic to South Asian stories and viewers.
There was a lot of concern about whether the audience was ready for what we are bringing to the table. ... It's been so gratifying to be part of a show that is so unabashedly and unapologetically South Asian.
Anisha Nagarajan, who stars as Alice, the family maid in the new Monsoon Wedding musical, played one of the leads in Bombay Dreams. "There was a lot of concern about whether the audience was ready for what we are bringing to the table," Nagarajan says of the new show. "Maybe they weren't ready then but they are now and it's been so gratifying to be part of a show that is so unabashedly and unapologetically South Asian."
Monsoon Wedding is certainly arriving in a very different era. The success of Hamilton, A Strange Loop, and others has shown that leaning into cultural difference can work, both commercially and creatively. Masi Asare, who co-wrote the lyrics for the current production and is a professor of musical theater at Northwestern University says she wants to "push the envelope" with Monsoon Wedding. "We have a beautiful score that doesn't sound like your typical American musical ... it's really exciting to see the form grow and stretch in other directions."
"We are the combination of the traditional and the modern. We don't let go of our values and yet we dance in tandem with the West," says Indian composer and filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj. Above, a still from the film Monsoon Wedding. Criterion Collection hide caption
Integrating those forms has meant years of drafts and revisions. The play's associate director Arpita Mukherjee says the process wasn't about "taking our Indian tradition and just pigeonholing it into the musical theater where it doesn't work. It's really a melding and that's taken a lot of careful time."
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