Review of Monsoon Wedding (2001) by Ashlee C — 18 Nov 2013

One line summary: Overrated, laborious.

Not as good as Nair's 1997 film, Kama Sutra: a Tale of Love.

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Families meet in Delhi for an arranged marriage between Aditi Verma (daughter of Lalit and Pimmi Verma) and Hemant Rai.

PK Dubey is the lower class, foul-mouthed, wedding arranger who is interested in the maid, Alice. Lalit is having money trouble; this translates to slow payments to PK.

Ria Verma is the unmarried cousin of Aditi, who was abused by Tej Puri when she was younger.

Aditi decides to visit her old flame one last time. That does not work out well, and reminds one of the phrase, 'get a room.' The police were quite amused. Aditi tells Hemant about this. Oh, what a mistake. He tells her that they will just fit in Houston, Texas, where he currently works. He is not amused. He decides to go through with it, and I did not see any particular believable justification for that change of heart.

At that point in the movie, I was ready to quit. Slow, boring, not engaging, no sympathetic characters, except perhaps Lalit and PK. Then it gets worse; the child molestation issue was not handled well.

Happy ending, I guess. Things turned out well for PK.

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Cinematography: 7/10 Variable.

Sound: 8/10 Good most of the time.

Acting: 6/10 Cheers to Naseerruddin Shah (Lalit), Tillotama Shome (Alice), Vijay Raaz (PK). Thumbs down otherwise, particularly for the actors who played the bride and groom.

Screenplay: 6/10 Neither engaging nor believable. The story is rather good, so I would blame the direction, plus poor choices for many of the acting roles.