A Flood of Familial Feelings

If you want to talk about the world, Anton Chekhov once said, talk about your own village. In “Monsoon Wedding,” director Mira Nair has persuasively taken this advice, returning to India’s Delhi and coming up with an energetic and amusing romantic drama about the power of love to make things whole.

Nair, whose best-known work is the Oscar-nominated “Salaam Bombay!,” has said this film, conceived in a spirit of low-key casualness, was meant to be no big deal. But because she and screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan know their world so well and are so comfortable in it, “Monsoon Wedding” has an engaging warmth and an effortless sense of life. It also has an instinct for the humanity and universality of situations that are comic, romantic and quite seriously dramatic by turns.

“Monsoon Wedding” takes place in an India that is finding a balance between tradition and modernity, paralleling the way its middle-class characters alternate between Hindi, Punjabi and English in their everyday speech and fit venerated cultural practices into a world of e-mail and cell phones.

Similarly, Nair’s film, smartly shot by Declan Quinn in very mobile Super 16 millimeter blown up to 35 millimeter, mixes the reality-caught-on-the-fly techniques of independent filmmaking with the always entertaining music and dance conventions of India’s mass-audience Bollywood films.

Given how they combine passion, tension, unresolved emotional issues and inevitable chaos, weddings are natural subjects for filmmakers. Nair has upped the ante by making this a Punjabi wedding as well. “The Punjabis are to India,” she explains in a director’s statement, “what the Italians are to Europe: We party hard, work hard and have a huge appetite for life.”

Rather like Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park,” “Monsoon Wedding” begins with a welter of characters thrown at you all at once, so many that it’s understandable when one of the group confesses, “I don’t even know who’s who half the time.” Almost everyone onscreen is a member of a very extended family that is gathering in Delhi from all over the world to celebrate the arranged marriage of Aditi (Vasundhara Das), the only daughter of Lalit (celebrated Indian actor Naseeruddin Shah) and Pimmi Verma (Lillete Dubey), a ceremony that is only four days away.

All this chaos is especially hard on Lalit, responsible for everything going smoothly as well as for paying the ever-increasing bills. He snaps at a college-age nephew just back from Sydney, calling him “bloody No. 1 most stupid duffer,” and he snaps at his own young son (Ishaan Nair, the director’s nephew) for his fascination with TV cooking shows. Most of all he snaps at P.K. Dube, the wedding’s caterer and event coordinator.

As played by Vijay Raaz, Dube is a character of almost Dickensian comic humanity. Excitable, brash, upwardly mobile to the point of wearing an ascot, Dube is a parvenu entrepreneur who juggles the truth the way he juggles his workers’ schedules and continually munches on marigolds, the Indian wedding flower.

Despite all these preparations, Aditi is not at all sure she wants to be married to Hemant (Parvin Dabas), the nice young Houston resident she’s only just met. It seems she’s not quite over the steamy affair she’s had with a married man. She confesses her doubts to her unmarried cousin Ria (Shefali Shetty), who, it turns out, has been living with secrets of her own.

It’s not only Aditi who has barriers to overcome on the way to potential romance, and, in the best Bollywood tradition, both the attractions and the obstacles are partially worked out in song and dance. The bloody No. 1 most stupid duffer catches the eye of a young woman with a passion for Indian dance, something he knows nothing about. And the exasperating Dube finds himself attracted to Alice (Tilotama Shome), the family’s quiet, unassuming maid. This charming, unlikely relationship is “Monsoon Wedding’s” secret weapon, the pairing whose pitfalls and potential involve us the most.

Because it starts out so frantic, “Monsoon Wedding’s” later moments of introspection and drama come as something of a calming relief. And when the film’s unexpected darker chords do manifest themselves, they don’t clash with the overall sense of accepting humanity but rather extend and deepen it.

Inescapably foreign yet endearingly familiar, “Monsoon Wedding” manages to gather all its threads so satisfactorily that audiences will feel like celebrating at the wedding as much as any of those guests. “Life is such a comedy,” a celebrant says, but its not often as satisfying as the one we have here.

*

MPAA rating: R for language, including some sex-related dialogue. Times guidelines: a subplot involving abuse and another involving an extramarital affair, but generally very discreet, appropriate for older teen audiences. In Punjabi and Hindi with English subtitles.

‘Monsoon Wedding’

Naseeruddin Shah...Lalit Verma

Lillete Dubey...Pimmi Verma

Shefali Shetty...Ria Verma

Vijay Raaz...P.K. Dube

Tilotama Shome...Alice

Vasundhara Das...Aditi Verma

Parvin Dabas...Hemant Rai

An IFC Productions presentation in association with Key Films, Pandora Films, and Paradis Films of a Mirabai Films production, released by USA Films. Director Mira Nair. Producers Caroline Baron, Mira Nair. Executive producers Jonathan Sehring, Caroline Kaplan. Screenplay Sabrina Dhawan. Cinematographer Declan Quinn. Editor Allyson C. Johnson. Costumes Arjun Bhasin. Music Mychael Danna. Production design Stephanie Carroll. Art director Sunil Chabra. Set dresser Ayesha Punvani. Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes.

Exclusively at Landmark’s Regent, 1045 Broxton Ave., Westwood, (310) 208-3259.