Showers of praise!

Arthur J Pais

Monsoon Wedding, one of the best reviewed films in recent months, enjoyed strong box office favour in 76 theatres across North America and grossed a robust $775,000, jumping into the top 25 box office grosser list.

The exact positions will be known late Tuesday though estimates put it at 22nd position. Last week it was 32 on the weekend box office chart. Mira Nair's comedy drama averaged a strong $10,250 per screen and its gross reached $1.2 million.

The movie, which has played only in a handful of territories abroad including United Kingdom and Italy, has grossed about $6 million outside America. The foreign gross doesn't include its collections in India.

Made for about $1.5 million, Monsoon Wedding has already turned in a profit. According to conservative estimates, its worldwide gross could reach $50 million.

BBC's London critic saw this coming. Reviewing the film, which remained on the list of top 15 films in Britain for three weeks, Sandi Chaitram noted about two months ago: "The films of Mira Nair have brought mixed reviews. After the critically acclaimed Salaam Bombay!, the films that followed never quite enjoyed the same success. Monsoon Wedding sees her back with a vengeance..."

The film opened on two screens in New York February 22, and was released in Los Angeles a week later. This weekend it opened in San Francisco, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Boston and several other cities.

While of most of the reviews for Monsoon Wedding were ecstatic, The New York Times gave a mixed review and Village Voice, the influential counter culture weekly, panned it. "...An air-conditioned bus tour of Punjabi ritual," said the Voice. "Nair stuffs the film with dancing, henna, ornamentation, and group song, but her narrative cliches and telegraphed episodes smell of old soap opera."

But Entertainment Weekly critic Owen Gleiberman echoed Mira Nair's assertion that she wanted to make a film about Indians' passion for a life filled with masti.

"It's fair to say that the cinema has rarely offered up a glimpse of a tradition-bound society that is this saturated in the techno-happy, media-wired trappings of the contemporary age." Gleiberman wrote giving the film an A-grade rating.

The Pulitzer Prize winning critic Roger Ebert writing in Chicago Sun Times called the film joyous and moving. "It could be the first Indian film to win big at the North American box office," he wrote.

Cinegoers agree with the likes of Ebert and Gleiberman, with many of them seeing the film for the second or third time. "Word of mouth is very crucial for a small film like this," said Mira Nair. "And it has been very very strong wherever the film has been shown."

ALSO READ:
The Review
Monsoon Wedding: The Story in Pictures
The Monsoon Wedding premiere