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MONSOON WEDDING For plebes like yours truly, these are pretty good times. People (okay, Westerners) are living better longer, and economic opportunities exist for upward mobility. Importantly, notions such as romantic love and the arts are no longer luxuries to be enjoyed only by royalty and the rich - the big swath called the middle class can now wallow and cheapen it as well. The upper middle class appears well-ensconced in the Delhi of MONSOON WEDDING as two families come together from all over the world for the nuptials. Chaos abounds, of course, despite the wedding planner. Can the Cosmopolitan-consulting bride-to-be still believe in love and enter into an arranged marriage? Will the bit about pedophilia, as awkward as colon-fresh crap in the chutney, fail to set up the feel-good slam of family over tradition and economic duty? Ahem, will it rain on wedding day? Unfortunately, Nair's feel-good scope includes more than the "upstairs," tainting what could have been an inoffensive fishbowl of fun. She lets in the door the messy issue of class then does as much thinking as a doorstop glossing it over. Nair stirs in a selective inclusivity that whitewashes what may make the Western heart bleed while still retaining those colourful accessories that wouldn't feel out-of-place at your local Pottery Barn. Pasteurized for your protection by Tourism India, MONSOON WEDDING is so pleasant that it's about as real as the taste of cherry in cough syrup. Sure, there are shaky cam shots of the streets of Delhi like winks from Nair saying, "I remember," but oh! isn't that child street vendor hawking his wares in the warm rain carrying the juiciest-looking Alfonso mangoes? Look, even our flowers are edible! Then, unhesitantly, unthinkingly, we're shaky-cammed back to this Xanadu where stocks, Sweet&Low, golf and boarding school (there hasn't been a film so desperate to show its middle class membership card since THE VERTICAL RAY OF SUMMER (what is it with these titles?)), co-exist with the housemaid crashing the wedding party. Opportunities for mobility may abound in today's Delhi but this begs for a leap into incredulity. LATE MARRIAGE A warts-and-all clash between tradition and modernity. Parents eager to wed their 31-year old son discover he is secretly seeing an older divorceé with child. Like a master high-wire act without a net, LATE MARRIAGE accomplishes an effortless naturalism laden with suspense at every step. | ||