Since it wasn’t very clearly marked on the video itself, I’ll warn
you right off that this movie is subtitled. I can see why they had a hard time
labeling it, though, because this movie, set in India, is bilingual. The characters
flip between Hindi and heavily accented English, sometimes within the course
of a single sentence. This can be quite hard to get used to.
But even with this linguistic barrier to overcome,
you’ll want to keep watching. It’s rather hard to keep the characters apart at first (the
odd camera work and the fact that they’re all supposed to be related don’t
help with that), but the initial effort definitely pays off.
The movie tells the story of the days surrounding an arranged marriage in which
an Indian woman marries an Indian-American man. During these days, everything
that could happen does. The bride is tempted to run off with a married lover,
past family secrets are laid bare, and the obnoxious wedding coordinator falls
in love with a family servant (who inexplicably loves him back), to name a few
of the twists. Of course, there’s also a monsoon during the wedding (good thing
the father of the bride paid extra for the rain-proofing on the tents).
This movie runs the gamut of emotions, but mostly made me laugh. I have a feeling
this is one of those movies I could watch repeatedly and still not catch all
the layers—but have fun trying to figure out.