Aparita

Toronto Star

Director Mira Nair’s new movie takes a light hearted look at her homeland

Filmmaker Mira Nair calls her latest movie a love song to her hometown of Delhi.

But it’s a very contemporary Delhi, and by extension, India, she’s talking about - where the “Guccis and the Pradas meet the power (outages) and traffic jams, and everyone has a cell phone.”

For Nair, capturing the multiplicities of a globalized India was the impetus behind Monsoon Wedding, which opened in Toronto yesterday.

The film, about a wedding in a Punjabi family, is replete with the tradition, fun, ribaldry and chaos that accompany the event.

“It’s a masti movie,” says Nair during a recent interview in New York before launching on a whirlwind tour of the Sundance and Berlin festivals. “It shows the incredible zest for life that Punjabis have. We have.”

Despite the funky South Indian spelling of her name, Nair says she’s proud of her Punjabi ancestry.

“This is my family,” says the 44-year-old director, resplendent in a coffee-colour raw silk churidaar kurta (an Indian outfit). “It’s totally close to home.”

The paintings, the furniture in the house, the saris, even the jewellery worn in the film were borrowed from friends and family. The food was catered from the family kitchen.

Nair, the daughter of an administrative service officer, grew up in the Indian state of Orissa. She studied at Delhi University’s Miranda College, and worked as an actress with a Delhi-based street theatre group. In 1976, she won a scholarship to study at Harvard, where she “stumbled upon” documentary filmmaking. Now Nair divides her time between New York City, New Delhi and Kampala, Uganda, the home of her husband Mahmood Mamdani.

When asked why she chose a lighthearted take on modern India, Nair retorts she’s always had fun with her movies.

“I think Salaam Bombay was damn funny,” says Nair. “Mississippi Masala was also funny in parts. And I wanted to make a movie about contemporary India. I mean, why not? I haven’t seen it (in films), and I live in it.”

Nair’s 1988 feature Salaam Bombay dealt with the street children of the city (now known as Mumbai). It was nominated for an Academy Award for best foreign-language film and won the Camera d’Or for best first feature at the Cannes film festival.

Mississippi Masala, which came out in 1991, was about an interracial romance between an African-American man (Denzel Washington) and a South-Asian woman (Sarita Choudhury).
Nair also directed The Perez Family (1995) and Kama Sutra: A Tale Of Love (1996).

Monsoon Wedding, which was showcased at the Toronto International Film Festival last year, also won the Golden Lion award - the top prize - at the Venice Film Festival in September.
And last weekend, it premiered exclusively at two New York City theatres and grossed an impressive $68,546 (all figures in U.S.).

Before this Monsoon mania hit the city, Nair sipped a cup of tea inside the Essex House Hotel as New Yorkers enjoyed mild temperatures in nearby Central Park.

“If there is one country that can stand up to American cultural imperialism, it is India,” says Nair.

“Because time and again, we’ve taken, borrowed, stolen, assimilated, plagiarized and just squeezed the hell out of any society that has come into (India). But we make something out of it that is inimitably Indian.”

She calls it the miniskirt by day and sari by night phenomenon.

“It’s so much more different than my time, when things were still phoren (foreign) and desi (Indian),” says Nair. “But now it’s one big interesting navigation of criss-crossing languages, music - that kind of thing.”

Bollywood, India’s moviemaking industry, and the way it has pervaded all manner of life in India also fascinates Nair.

“Even one’s own wedding is slightly Bollywood-ized,” she marvels. “People who have money hire production designers from Bollywood movies to design their weddings.”

Monsoon Wedding indulges in the sensuous monsoon season - from mid-July to September - that’s often invoked in Indian literature and arts. But the decision to film the movie during this time, which coincided with her son’s summer vacation, was also a practical one.

“I love the monsoons - the sense of liberation you wait for after a crippling heat wave,” says Nair. “And I wanted to have my son with me when I work.”

The idea was to go back to something beautiful but basic, on a miniscule budget of $1.5 million.

“It was a small movie,” says Nair. “But then you’re working with 68 actors, and many stories, and 30 days in the heat and the rain, and it feels big.”

A handheld camera added to the naturalness and captured a feeling of immediacy. “The idea was to draw you into the wedding, into the choreographed madness,” she says.

“You had to become a part of them because when you go to an Indian wedding, you can’t remain an outsider,” says Nair as her throaty laugh reverberates in the room. “Inevitably you will be roped in to do something or the other.”

Monsoon Wedding centres around the nuptials of Aditi Verma (Vasundhara Das) and Hemant Rai (Parvin Dabas). Aditi’s father Lalit (Naseeruddin Shah) and mother Pimmi (Lilette Dubey) want to have a grand wedding for their only daughter.

Relatives from Dubai, Australia and the United States fly into Delhi. Bollywood music interweaves the traditional engagement and mehndi (henna) ceremonies. Scotch and gin-and-tonic flow as freely as orange juice.

Hemant is a recent IIT (the Indian equivalent of MIT) graduate and lives in Houston, Tex. Aditi is a Cosmo queen who figures her semi-arranged marriage will give her some stability in life that her married ex-lover can’t.

She could refuse to marry Hemant, but Aditi is looking for an escape from the heat and the inanities of Delhi. Yet she can’t seem to let go of her ex-lover until a midnight tryst in the back of his SUV goes wrong - they’re caught by two policemen.

“Oh, God. Almost everyone who lives in Delhi has a policeman story,” Nair shudders, referring to the police harassment faced by couples - a common affair in a prudish Indian society that frowns upon public intimate gestures.

“Sometimes (the police) are after a cheap thrill,” she says. “And it’s just so twisted - they make you feel like s—. These people (in the film) were getting off on it by abusing their power.”
In addition to Aditi and Hemant’s story, there are four other narratives going on in the movie, including one about incest and child abuse.

“These things happen,” says Nair. “Not just in Indian families. But we don’t have that Oprah-style culture that allows us a forum to talk about it.”

Technorati Tags: MiraNair