Direction: Ritu Sarin, Tenzing Sonam
Rating: ***
There’s a saying in Hindi about how the taste of water and the language
spoken changes with every new town or village in India. The same could be said
of wedding rituals.
Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam’s documentary (75 mins) looks like it’s been
made for an international audience, but to its credit, it does not attempt to
glamourise its subject.
The subject is an Indian wedding — not the lavish
song-and-dance-in-Manish-Malhotra-lehengas that Bollywood has sold extensively,
but a simple, village affair that provides a truer, more democratic picture.
Hari is a taxi driver in Dharamsala, and he’s agreed to an arranged
marriage just because he knows it will make his father happy. In choosing to
trace a male protagonist, the film avoids a cliché – that it’s only the woman
in small-town India who makes compromises in an arranged marriage.
Hari’s met the girl just once, and he regrets that he wasn’t even able to
see her face. All he remembers is how short she is, and that bothers him. He’s
no Clint Eastwood, at 5 ft-something, but he’s worried his to-be-wife is “not
even 4 ft…people make fun of short people”.
Hari’s no trained actor, so his spontaneity before the camera is
remarkable. He chats with the girl on phone, flirts even (their only way of
getting to know each other, he says), speaks broken English and shows clarity
of thought – “India is a magic country for foreigners because the dollar
multiplies,” he says.
Though the rituals are unique, the expenses, the worried father, the
spontaneous happiness that weddings bring are familiar. You wish, however, that
there was a little less of the filmmakers on screen, and the questions they ask
at times were not so generic.
Yet, as documentaries go, Hari… manages to do its job — capture a real
story with a lot of honesty.
The documentary manages to do its job — capture a real story with a lot
of honesty.
-Sarit Ray
Review originally published in hindustantimes.com (click here to see)
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