Monsoon Wedding 4 -13 -16

Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding, successfully tackles the difficult task of creating a film that is globally accessible (excluding the obvious limitations of representing every language and culture) and with the lofty decision to do so, Nair's movie takes on sexuality in different ways through its bevvy of differentiated characters. The expression of various elements of sexuality is in some way a boon directly tied to the decision to create a film aimed, in part, at the Western audiences as well as Indian audiences.

With characters coming from Australia, Southwest Asia, America, and India for a wedding, almost ironically, the first important character and scene we see them in is, what we learn in retrospect, of an affair between to-be-wed Aditi and her ex-boyfriend. Aditi, being one of the characters living in India. The irony of her characters actions is that it goes against the traditionally conservative and normative (arguably more female) Indian relationship. But when we reach the few shots regarding Tej and his young niece, there comes such an effective instillation of concern over the their relationship together using a shot that deliberately blocks out Tej from view as he bends over Aliya to feed her, slowly revealing Tej as Ria gets closer to the door. This development, as Jenny Sharpe writes in her book “Gender, Nation, And Globalization,” is “the disturbing topic of sexual molestation—a subject too controversial for popular Indian cinema,” and is one that is able to be included due to Nair making the movie under their New York-based company, Mirabai Films (Sharpe 61).

Having a New York-based company to produce the film through is not exactly enough to avoid alienating too large a population of viewers and so Nair specifically maintains multiple story arcs which buttress the film as a whole but also soften the serious, and in the case of Tej, sinister alternate plots. Of these various plots, we also see Varun's troubling relationship with his parents as they struggle (mostly the father) to understand/accept their son's very likely homosexuality and actually plan to send him to boarding school in an attempt to somehow squelch the homosexuality out of him by surrounding him with more boys (logic). Varun's arc within the movie is received globally by the west and in India in likely a similar way as in the early 2000s, when narratives surrounding homosexuality were making slow integrations into popular culture and cinema in positive and less stereotypical ways. Nair blends Varun's sexuality into the milieu of the film without ham-fistedly expressing it through characterization. By presenting this film with the globalized scope that is has, Varun stands as a character that is able to be accepted by merely depicting the realistic struggles that he faces with his parents.

We also have the young, lust-driven romance between Rahul and Ayesha, the two frequently stealing glances at each other as well as show Ayesha sneaking off into the night, scantily clothed, to meet Rahul, who is just in his underwear. Before this scene, we see Ayesha practicing their dance routine together when Rahul enters the room and Ayesha immediately runs up to him to flaunt in front of him, the camera hastily following along and zooming in to position itself at Rahul's eye-level, keeping Ayesha's lower half of her body as the centerpiece for as much as the shot as possible to further suggest her sexual nature and Rahul's willing sexual appetite.

And then there is the earnest romance between Dubey and Alice who exhibit more of a traditional Bollywood style flirtation with their innocent looks and youthful, uncomfortable and quiet amour shared with each other throughout the movie.

Rahul and Ayesha represent the non-traditional while Dubey and Alice represent the traditional. Both romances project a certain notion of egalitarianism by Dubey marrying beneath his caste and by Ayesha willing exploring her own sexual self without the guidance or restriction of a patriarchal presence. As Jamila mentions in her presentation, the women in the film, like Aditi, are able to choose “to be a sexual being.” The same freedom is given to Ria (as well as Aliya), not sexually, but as a character that had specifically been taken advantage of by a patriarchal figure as a young girl and was later in the film released from this power dynamic with the help of Lalit in his public demonstration to remove Tej from the party, and likely from the family in a larger sense.

Overall, the film takes many liberties with the blending of western and Indian cultural norms, traditions, and other commentaries in order to create a globally inviting film with content accessible to all while also pushing a sexually progressive and feminist narrative with virtually all of its characters like Aditi, Varun, Ayesha, Ria and Alice. The success with these narratives also comes with the territory of the globalized approach in that it is able to take pieces of culture from the west and India and the complications of each and provide commentary on both which suggests a certain message of trans-nationality with the events that unfold throughout the film as though these experiences are not necessarily indigenous to only one place.

Side notes: Rahul is an impregnable wall when it comes to insults slung at him from Lalit. It was hilarious at first because Rahul seems like such a burnout and can't seem to be responsible for anything even his own safety (injured hand) but by the end I couldn't help but start to feel sort of sorry for him because that literally just was the way he was addressed each time by Lalit, as an idiot.

I also absolutely loved how Nair presented the situations surrounding Varun, Ria, Aliya and Tej. Neither were told to the audience or deliberately shown, they were relatively subtle and arguably your suspicions are then later reaffirmed near the end of the film but the shots that lead up to those resolutions/explanations kept the viewer in suspense to know more about the character developments.