Movie review: Wedding Season

(courtesy IMDb (c) Netflix)

Love may indeed be a many-splendoured thing but in the hands of Hollywood’s filmmakers, it has often not been culturally diverse in a way that reflects the composition of many modern societies, especially ones as multiculturally diverse as the USA or Australia.

Thankfully a growing group of culturally and ethnically diverse filmmakers are delivering up romantic comedies that not only take a whole fresh look at love and marriage but do so through a lense that acknowledges that while romantic love may be a universal constant, how it is expressly most certainly is not.

Take Wedding Season as a welcome example of this trend, a film that dives deep and with considerable wit and originality, even as it observes tried-and-true rom-com norms, into how finding a life partner is dealt with in Indian diaspora communities that often have an older guard heeding timeless traditions while having the next generation either want to find love on their own terms or are happy not to pursue it at all.

It’s in that awkward in-between place that no one, younger or older, seems entirely sure how to navigate that Wedding Season spins a delightfully frothy and quick-witted story of two people who, confronted with the fact that their traditional Indian parents want them to get married and get marriage NOW, cook up a plan to pretend to be dating during the Indian community’s wedding season so they have more time to find that perfect person on terms that suit them.

The plan devised by successful microloan banker Asha (Pallavia Sharda) and Ravi (Suraj Sharma) may not be the most innovative of ploys, with the tactic a well-worn rom-com staples in films as recent as Love Hard and Single All the Way, but it works because it reflects the desperation of second generation immigrant Indian kids who don’t necessarily want to do things their parents way.

While the film is set in New Jersey, Australian-born Sharda explains to The Sydney Morning Herald that she believes the themes in Wedding Season are universal.

“We wanted to celebrate Indian families and as much as this is set in New Jersey it could be an Indian family with second generation children anywhere,” Sharda says. “It’s such a far-reaching diaspora and I don’t think many people understand – apart from those who grew up in a third-culture environment – the parallels that happen in Indian communities. You can’t escape what the motherland gave us as an inheritance.”

With a screenplay by Shiwani Srivastava and a cast of second and first generation Indian actors all of whom are in fine form with a story that is bright, shiny and fun but with real cultural insight and emotional substance to its credit, the film beautifully expresses what it is like to be caught between worlds, a foot in both the traditional and non-traditional worlds and a lack of surety about where to head next.

While it’s a serious film in one sense with a lot of pithy things to say about what it is like to be part of two cultures, and the positives and negatives that come with that, it keeps things light and bubbly much of the time, relying on mostly well-judged comedy to make some pitch perfect points.

It doesn’t always land every comedic gambit with the Asha’s soon-to-be brother-in-law Nick (Sean Kleier), who is supposed to be the white guy doing his best to please his Indian-American parents-in-law Vijay (Rizwan Manji) and Suneeta (Veena Sood) – the latter is the pushier of the two parents, enrolling Asha in an online Indian dating app without her knowledge, the same fate which befalls Ravi at the hands of his pushy dad – coming across a court jester who doesn’t pay attention to any of the cues he’s given time and again.

It’s sweet that he loves Asha’s sister Priay (Arianna Afsar) so much that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to win over her parents but he comes across as a well-meaning imbecilic klutz at times, funny but cringingly so, especially since he’s meant to be a neurosurgeon, who doesn’t quite deliver on the idea that people will go to great lengths to belong to a community that very much values people marrying within it.

Nick is meant to demonstrate what everyone coming into contact with an unyielding set of community expectations is up against, but while he doesn’t always work as a character and not do his actions really make the intended point, Ravi and Asha do an exemplary job of exploring what it’s like to be caught between a rock of Indian parents determined to marry their offspring off on traditional terms and the hard place of being caught between two cultures with vastly divergent ideas on love and marriage.

For a film that seeks to do a lot of heavy lifting examining what it means to be both Indian and American in a way that the first generation immigrant parents will never be, Wedding Season is a lot of fun, thanks to vibrantly well-sketched characters, zingy dialogue that manages to be both cleverly humourous and emotionally resonant all at once, and eye for the absurdity of being stuck trying to please both your parents and your own aspirations.

It is, in many ways, a fairly traditional sitcom, trading on the idea that you can pretend to be in love while actually falling in love, rather delightfully with both Sharma and Sharda portraying what it’s like to take on all that pretense to get parents off your back while then finding that what you were trying to avoid actually happens.

While it doesn’t really handle the great final act splitting of the ways that is a time honoured part of any rom com worth its will-they-won’t-they salt as well as you might want – frankly the argument that temporarily sets Asha and Ravi apart is angry confection that doesn’t really stand up to much scrutiny (yes, even in a rom-com) – Wedding Season is a film that honours the genre’s tropes and cliches without feeling like a tired, bland retread of them, able to both make some serious points about old community attitudes meeting modern sensibilities and still have a huge amount of fun, aided by some supremely catchy music, a belief that love triumphs all, and a universal love of the idea that if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be and nothing, not even determined Indian parents, can stand in its way (even if, the film happily acknowledges, they may not be completely wrong after all).

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