ITALY: INDIAN FILM "MONSOON WEDDING" IS AMONGST THE COMPETITION AT FOR THE PRESTIGIOUS GOLDEN LION AT THE VENICE FILM FESTIVAL

Record ID: 391951

  • Title: ITALY: INDIAN FILM "MONSOON WEDDING" IS AMONGST THE COMPETITION AT FOR THE PRESTIGIOUS GOLDEN LION AT THE VENICE FILM FESTIVAL
  • Date: 31st August 2001
  • Summary: VENICE, ITALY (SEPTEMBER 1, 2001) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) MIRA NAIR, DIRECTOR, SAYING, "I was very keen on the upstairs downstairs view of India because in no other country I know is the coexistence so complete at the mansion and the slum outside and this coexistence has been there for time long past, and my mother tells the story that when I was growing up going
  • Embargoed: 15th September 2001 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: VENICE, ITALY
  • Country: Italy
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVAE18TR1ZCV0ZTJKQ0H61HL7T4M
  • Story Text: Rain drenched Venice played host to Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding, the tale of an extended Punjabi family who gather for an arranged marriage and all the laughter, love and torment that accompanies it, drawing a rapturous response from festival audiences.
    As the rainy season approaches, an upper-middle class Punjabi family prepare for the marriage of their only daughter.
    All the relatives of their extended family fly into Delihi from all over the world as the bride doubts her potential happiness with her arranged husand to be. Mira Nair's film takes a fond, if ironic look at love and family in a realistic style that is a world away from the stylised Bollywood films that many associate with the Indian film industry.
    Veteran actor, Nasseruddin Shah, has has acted in around 75 Bollywood films, playing the art of the bride's father, part of the film's appeal for him was it's realism.
    "The fact that it was a reality check on a Bollywood movie was what appealed to me, because there had been a number of regular Bollywood movies made with a wedding, a family wedding as a setting and like all usual Bollywood movies, everything is synthetic in such movies, the characters, the clothes they wear, the way they look, the way they speak, the kind of situations they are put it, the kind of backdrops that are used, and Mira's first idea was that this is a reality check on a movie like that, what actually goes on rather that having hugely melodramatic situations and the kind of soppy melodrama that occurs, and at the same time it was making use of all the usual Bollywood cliché's to make a little statement".
    As a senior and experienced cast member, Shah was responsible for helping the younger cast members prepare, for many it was their first film: "I felt very fatherly toward them all, there were a number of people that were doing their first move, and Mira put me in charge of conducting a workshop with all of them before we started shooting, and I do teach at the Nation School of Drama in Delhi, I am a visiting lecturer there, so I enjoyed it greatly, and the attitude of all these kids was absolutely marvellous, where they were willing to try things out, none of them had any idea what it involved, but as a teacher or a director of acting you have to make the process enjoyable for he student and if you don't you run the risk of turning them off for life, so it's also a huge responsibility."
    Tilotama Shome is one of the cast who were acting in film for the first time, she plays Alice, the family's servant, who falls in love with the Dubey, who has been hired to plan the wedding preparations,
    "It was a very different experience for me, that is the word I would use, it so multifacted, because there is so much that I am going through and have gone through, even while the shooting of the film, and I thought when I finished the shooting of the film that would be it,that's all behind me, now get on with your studies kid, normal life, and this is all taking me by surpise because I thought that I wouldn't meet these people again, I wouldn't meet Mira again, and all of them have come back to my life and in what a place like Venice."
    Parvin Dabas plays the groom in the arranged marriage, his character has to decide whether to go through with the wedding when his fiancee confesses that she has still been seeing her ex-lover, a married man. For Dabas, the film's success is it's global appeal, "It's really nice when everybody no matter what culture you are from can feel, like this is this could be a wedding anywhere because this is the kind of mayhem you feel, relatives over and this and that and what going to happen, is everything on time. So it is nice when people from all different cultures feel the same way and can relate to a film like that."
    Director Mira Nair, whose other films include Salaam Bombay! And Mississippi Masala, wanted to create a film that focused on the class divides between wealthy families and their servants, but also depited various types of love:"I was very keen on the upstairs downstairs view of India because no other country I know is the coexistence so complete af the mansion and the slum outside and this coexistance has been there for time long past, and my mother tells the story that when I was growing up going jogging in the morning, aged 15, and coming back with the mikman because I wanted to know about his life, we live with servants but we never really know what happens in their lives, and so the idea of Alice and Dubey was born, the idea of magic love, because along with this portrait of upstairs downstairs we wanted to make an interweaving tale of aspects of love, and abusive love, dysfunctional love, of what I call the old shoes love, the love of a marriage of 25 years where the passion has gone, the sex has gone and yet it is rekindled again when the daughter is leaving home and faced with a family crisis of another dilemma, so it was a combination of different strains of love that would capture the upstairs downstairs view of Indian life".
    Although the realistic style of the film, which was shot entirely on hand held camera, gives a truthful portrait of Indian life, Nair is well aware of the impact that highly stylised Bollywood extravaganzas have on India, and draws on this thought her film,
    "In today's India, Bollywood is no longer to be looked down on a s high kitsch, it is chic it is refined, it is sophisticated, and the young love it, so the young have incorporated Bollywood singing and dancing into completely all classes of Indian life, it never used to be this way 20 years ago, so that even in the middle class, upper middle class like in Monsoon Wedding, it would be ompletely realistic today to be at a family wedding and have a young niece stand up and imitate a Bollywood star's song, my family have been begging me to make a Bollywood movie and I want to one day, but Monsoon Weddning is like Bollywood in my terms, incorporating that with a great sense of love for it, not to poke fun at it at all, but to make it still on my terms"
    The cast and director were stunned be the film's reception, as the audience of the official screening burst into spontaneous applause throughout the film, "It was like being a t home, in India it is completely interactive, they clap,they whistle, they shout no no don't do that and it was like these bloody aristocratic Venezians clapping like Bollywood style, I loved it, I was amazed.
    Monsoon Wedding is amonst the in competition for the prestigious Golden Lion, and if the audience response is anything to go by, is a strong contender.
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