Monsoon Wedding...blame it on the rain

My other rental for the week (Blockbuster Rewards people, check it out) was Monsoon Wedding. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this movie. I was expecting it to be My Big Fat Punjabi Wedding with dancing, but it was really a very beautiful movie.

The movie follows a woman on the eve of her arranged marriage to a man who has been living in Texas. Their wedding is a traditional Punjabi wedding, which includes many ceremonies over four days. Wedding movies are often played for laughs, and rightly so, there's a wealth of material. Monsoon Wedding has some of that, but I was surprised that the movie dealt with a lot of deeper issues. The bride-to-be is struggling with feelings for her recent ex-boyfriend - a married television host - and trying to decide if marriage is what she really wants. There is another crisis of family that really surprised me (I won't spoil it here, though it's quite obvious once you start watching the movie) involving Ria (played by the gorgeous Shefali Shetty), an unmarried cousin of the bride.

The colors used in this film were amazing. Everything from the costumes to the wedding decorations (tons of marigolds, which apparently you can eat) was so bold and vibrant. One of the funniest moments of the movie for me, culturally speaking at least, was when the wedding planner starts decorating a tent in the "new fashion" of white, and the father of the bride comes out and yells at him "What do you think this is, a funeral? I want color!" The music was also pretty amazing, and even though there was a bit of dancing, this is definitely not a Bollywood movie.

Monsoon Wedding was just a very pleasant movie about the bonds of family, and a lucky first glimpse for me into Indian cinema.