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Standing
On Ceremony Filmmaker
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As a follow-up to her 16th century erotic period piece, Kama Sutra: A Tale of Love, Mira Nair returned this fall to her Indian homeland to shoot Monsoon Wedding. Says Nair, Monsoon Wedding "Interweaves stories taking place in the four days leading up to a middle-class Punjabi wedding in today's Delhi dot-com" society. Punjabis are known for working really hard and playing the hardest of all. And weddings exemplify this sort of baccharalic let's pull out all the stops and have fun" attitude." But, Nair continues, the film's nonstop wedding party also provides the film some sober observations: "(Monsoon Wedding) is sort of a Chekhovian human drama that takes place within the context of this wedding. The four interwoven stories deal with the different aspects of love: dysfunctional love, magic romance and teenage lust. Like Kama Sutra, Monsoon Wedding plays off Nair's own complicated love affair with Bollywood. Kama Sutra, whose unapologetic representation of female sexuality created a national controversy when it screened in India, was also a reworking of the Bollywood historical fantasy genre. And although Monsoon Wedding adopts production strategies culled from American independent film, it also mirrors a standard Bollywood convention. According to Nair, "We wanted to capture the realism, or the musty," as we call it, of an Indian Punjabi wedding. Bollywood does this a lot, but the wedding movies in Bollywood are Bollywood-ized with songs and choreographed dances that are (not found at) a normal wedding. To make this world realistic, Nair guided well-known Bollywood actors through, for them, a very different production method. Nair explains, "We had two solid weeks of rehearsals that included an hour-and-a-half of yoga before we started. The fact that we did a 30-day film from start to finish in sequence is pretty much unheard of in Bollywood. "That kind of continuity, the ability to build characters from beginning to end was something that the actors had never experienced but loved." Moreover, Nair kept the production crew like family, using many of the same Americans with whom she had made Kama Sutra (producer Caroline Baron, d.p. Delcan Quinn, set decorator Stephanie Carroll). And Nair's own family was on hand to serve up craft services. But no matter how un-Bollywood she tried to make her production, the Indian film business had a way of intruding, especially in the form of screaming teenage girls swooning outside the set with the knowledge that their idol, Parvin Dabas, was on the other side.
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