Miss Wonton; Monsoon Wedding
Miss Wonton and Monsoon Wedding don't just grapple with the new, global future, they weave it into the narrative in an easygoing way, hipping us to the fact that it's not an op-ed page abstraction. Their characters are thinking about this stuff and living it, too.
Miss Wonton tells the story of Ah Na (newcomer Amy Ting), a young Chinese woman who flees persecution in her home country and comes to New York, where she lives and works at a Chinese restaurant run by a kindly, rather fatherly owner (Ben Wang), who shows her the small room she'll occupy. It includes various personal shrines created by previous occupants, one of which recreates Madonna's home in Miami. (Madonna's story?working-class Detroit girl comes to New York and becomes famous?is discussed at length, and becomes a metaphor for an immigrant's most optimistic dreams.) Ah Na desperately wants a better life than the one she left behind, and aims to find it at Grand Central Station, where young, attractive Asian women go in order to hook up with well-off white businessmen. Ah Na falls in with a married businessman named Jack (James Burns), who brings her back to his place in the Jersey suburbs; she makes the classic Other Woman mistake of assuming the guy actually loves her, and begins planning a future with him (one that includes her aged mother).
It's a bittersweet story, obviously shot on a shoestring (although Tsuyoshi Kimoto's resourceful photography captures the loneliness of Manhattan late at night and early in the morning), and it's acted appealingly (if sometimes awkwardly) by its promising cast. The flashbacks to Ah Na's repression in China?which seem to have been shot in the weeds of New Jersey?are brutal and moving. Still, I came away wishing it were better; Miss Wonton moves in fits and starts, and it often seems to use voiceover to patch up holes in the narrative and rescue weak scenes rather than offer ironic counterpoint to the action.
In many ways, the movie's backstory is more interesting than what's onscreen. Writer-director Meng Ong has said the story was inspired by his own mother's experience emigrating from China to Singapore. According to a film festival report, he originally wanted to make the protagonist a gay man, but switched genders to assure distribution in his native Singapore, where homosexuality is illegal. Ting won the lead role despite being a medical student/model who'd never acted on film, and acquitted herself honorably. (She looks like you could knock her over with a feather, but as the story goes on, her quiet strength becomes more and more impressive.) When Miss Wonton played in Asia last year, she became an instant sensation, but once she returned to the states, she was just another resident and had to find herself a day job; that job just happened to be at the World Trade Center Marriott. After the planes came in, Ting stayed behind to call people in the towers and warn them to get out immediately. She survived the disaster and went on to enlist in the U.S. Air Force. Sounds like a movie to me.
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Monsoon Wedding, the latest from Mira Nair (Mississippi Masala), is being praised as a feel-good crossover hit in some quarters and written off as too Western and commercial in others. Either description strikes me as condescending. It's Nair's grandest, most exciting movie?the story of a wedding at the home of a wealthy New Delhi family whose members have spread out across the globe, from the U.S. to Russia and Australia. Its documentary-like visual style, massive ensemble cast and deft shifting between tones and genres (from farce to romance to melodrama to musical) are unlike anything that's been attempted in American cinema recently; even the master of this sort of overstuffed, hyperreal drama, Robert Altman, tends to pick a single cinematic wavelength and stay on it.
Nair and screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan tell the story of shy New Delhi girl Aditi (Vasundhara Das) and her fiance Hemant (Parvin Dabas), a Houston-based engineer, who are participating in an old-fashioned arranged marriage. In the process, they capture a new social reality that's rarely been portrayed on film with such completeness. The would-be couple and their families speak English, Hindi and Punjabi, sometimes in the same scene; they listen to Western pop, sing traditional Indian songs a cappella and dance to Indian pop music that's been flavored with hiphop and techno; virtually every character, regardless of social status, carries a cellphone and uses it constantly. These people are truly citizens of the world. They're torn between honoring their culture's past (however restrictive it may be in some ways; witness the scene where a female character and her secret lover are caught in flagrante by cops and brutally humiliated) and embracing a new, high-tech, Westernized future that will make them a bit less unique and a bit more like everyone else. (Aditi's father, Lalit?played with heart-piercing directness by Naseeruddin Shah?offers his relatives a cigarette, is declined and playfully gripes: "America has made everyone quit smoking.")
Nair has said she wanted to reinterpret India's colorful, joyous Bollywood musicals for a Western audience (there are plenty of song-and-dance numbers, but they're all placed in a realistic context) and say useful things about the impact of globalization. Yet the fact that Nair accomplishes all these things shouldn't scare away viewers who just want to have a good time. Its massive ensemble cast ranges in age from roughly eight to 80, and the subplots cover everything from infidelity and aging to financial distress and one character's secret history of molestation. (You'd think the latter would unbalance the movie, but it only enriches it.) While the milieu is upper-middle-class to wealthy, it finds space for a subplot involving a wedding planner named Dube (Vijay Raaz) and a family servant named Alice (Tilotama Shome). It's as rich, surprising and universally appealing as a trope from Shakespearean comedy. (Stricken with love, the lanky, snaggle-toothed Dube becomes obsessed with marigolds, even devouring them like magic pills.)
Like The Snapper and Once Around?but superior to both?Monsoon Wedding captures the full range of human experience, from cradle to grave. It's the kind of film you can take nearly anybody to and they're guaranteed to find something memorable in it. A wedding song sung onscreen contains a phrase that sums up Nair's sophisticated humanist comedy: "Life intoxicates us."