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A Delhi Delight
By Jonathan Foreman
The New York Post, February 22, 2002

'Monsoon Wedding" is sheer delight. An ensemble comedy-drama that recalls Robert Altman's best work, it takes a familiar genre - the family reunion - and renders it as vibrant as the marigolds in an Indian wedding garland.

And like all good wedding parties, you don't want it to end.

"Monsoon Wedding" is blessed with wonderful performances, a bracing, clever script by newcomer Sabrina Dhawan, gorgeous photography by Declan Quinn, and the inspired direction of Mira Nair ("Salaam Bombay").

A perfect antidote to the season's bad-movie blues, "Monsoon Wedding" is also the first film to explore the mostly English-speaking upper-middle class of contemporary India.

It portrays this milieu with humor and affection, while examining, in an unpreachy fashion, daring topics of class and changing sexual mores.

The Verma family are Delhi Punjabis, depicted here in all their fabled exuberance, industriousness and ostentation. Their loving patriarch Lalit Verma (the great Naseerudin Shah) has arranged a marriage for his beautiful daughter Aditi (Vasundhara Das) to an engineer from Houston.

Lalit does not know the fair, Cosmopolitan-reading Aditi has been having an affair with a married TV-talk show host.

Meanwhile a tent is going up in the garden, cousins are arriving from all over, and as the cleansing monsoon approaches, love and sex are in the air. Cousin Ayesha (Neha Dubey), whose bare-shouldered outfits would have once marked her as a hooker, has her eye on an Australian cousin. Ria (terrific Shefali Shetty), Lalit's unmarried, orphaned niece starts to display a strange hostility to Lalit's best friend and benefactor. And the rascally, upwardly mobile, contractor PK Dubey (Vijay Raaz) is smitten by a shy housemaid (Tilotama Shome)

You've seen some of these characters before (especially if you've been to a Jewish wedding). But what makes "Monsoon Wedding" so fresh is Nair's deft balancing of drama, romance and comedy.

And while her interlinked plots unfold, she presents images of Delhi that form a love poem to the unchanging city of traffic-choked streets, afternoon ice cream in Connaught Circle and kites flying above rooftops at dusk.