By some unwritten rule of cinema, weddings provide ample opportunity for paternal hair-pulling, and for Lalit Verma (Naseerudin Shah), the father in Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, the nuptial of his only daughter Aditi will prove to be no exception. There is first the matter of the wedding planner, a sleaze bag named Dubey who, when not chattering on his cell phone to his stock broker, is devising new ways to stick it to poor Lalit. (A waterproof tent? You never mentioned that. It will cost you extra.) Dubey arrives at Lalit’s sprawling Delhi estate just in time to rescue an arch of orange marigolds from disintegrating into a heap of petals. Also arriving, via an assortment of SUVs and Mercedes-Benzes, are Lalit’s cousins, some of whom are true cousins in the blood sense, while others are close friends who have earned the familial appellation through generosity and/or time. Lalit’s niece, Ria, who has lived with Lalit’s family since her father died, arrives with the bride, Aditi (Vasundhara Shah), who for some reason is sulking. And we mustn’t forget the groom, Hemant (Parvin Dabas), who has just arrived with his parents from Houston, Texas of all places.

If you’re feeling somewhat lost by this point, then good: Monsoon Wedding wants to confuse you. Shot in the style of a home movie, with faces moving in and out of focus at random, and voices overlapping to form a thick, straggly carpet of chatter, the movie asks that you pay close attention lest you miss a crucial snippet wherein an identity is revealed or a relationship is established. The guests, who have all arrived for Aditi’s engagement ceremony and who will stay on for the wedding two days later, move from one mini-celebration to another, drinking and eating, or dancing and singing, or sometimes all four at the same time.

Monsoon Wedding does little more than document these three days of non-stop revelry. In this respect, it is a modest movie, one intent on evoking a specific place and a specific set of characters. There is no formal story, aside from a few romantic subplots, and the movie ends exactly where you expect it to, at the wedding. Filmed in thirty days using a hand-held camera and real locations, the movie retains many of its rough edges. The street scenes were filmed in New Delhi’s crowded marketplaces, and on a few occasions you can see pedestrians stare directly into the camera. The interior scenes are equally spontaneous, with the camera floating freely among the guests, coasting on the wave of conversation.

In so reducing their film to its simplest ingredients, Nair and screenwriter Sabrina Dhawan mask a much more complex outlook on modern Indian society. As they see it, India is anything but simple. It’s a society that’s in constant flux, pulled in one direction by tradition and in the other by Western culture. In assembling her diverse wedding party, Nair has created a melting pot into which she has thrown everything she can get her hands on: age, gender, social class, even nationality. Those critics who have accused Nair of transforming Indian culture into a tourist attraction, filled with exoticism and forbidden sexuality, will appreciate the lengths to which she goes to create an India so influenced by other cultures that, to foreign eyes at least, it’s barely recognizable. Here, people speak three languages, Hindi, Punjabi, and English, often in the same sentence. Nair has even thrown in an Australian-born Indian in the form of Lalit’s strapping but useless nephew who knows nothing about Indian culture and who, in typical Western fashion, hits on the first attractive woman he lays eyes on.

The youth contingent of the wedding party is unquestionably the most progressive, indulging in sports clubs, video games, and pre-marital sex, but even they ultimately bow to tradition. Aditi’s marriage is an arranged one, after all. She has little to say over who her husband will be, a concept to which she has resigned herself, though we suspect that she finds it a wee bit romantic. Her need to rebel manifests itself in an illicit affair with her ex-boyfriend, a local TV personality who happens to be married. At night, she meets him in his Jeep, and they drive to a remote location where they make out in the back seat. It’s abundantly clear, though, that Aditi’s heart is not into it. Her lower lip trembles and her large, uncertain eyes register uncertainty. Before very long, she is confessing her indiscretions to Hemant, her groom.

At its heart, Monsoon Wedding is shamelessly pro-family. It believes that unhappiness, rivalry, and dark secrets will fix themselves if we only persevere and stick together. The darkest secret belongs to Ria (Shefali Sheti), Aditi’s cousin, who suffered an unspecified sexual abuse at the hand of her uncle Tej. Now in her early twenties, Ria is frigid and closed-off. She keeps her eye on Tej who, it just so happens, is the shining star of the family, a self-made millionaire and family-man who has volunteered to finance Ria’s studies in the U.S. But when he starts showing too much affection towards one of his young nieces, it sends Ria over the edge in a wild outburst of revelations and accusations. Stunned into silence, the family must decide whether to collectively overlook Tej’s crime or to banish him altogether. The whole thing makes for some impressive theatrics, but the final choice, which Lalit makes after much heartache, comes off as a cause for celebration – a triumph of family values over evil – when it should have been played as a somber moment when this proud family noticed the first chip in its pristine veneer.

However disingenuous Nair’s vision of family life may seem, she’s never sloppy. Her dramatic choices feel too calculated, too bold, to be the work of a lazy sentimentalist. When Hemant forgives Aditi’s infidelity, there is indeed a swelling of music and a burst of sunshine. It’s a conscious decision informed by a Shakespearean sense of comedic justice in which the bad are punished, the good are rewarded, and everyone is paired off in the end. Even Dubey (Vijay Raaz), the annoying wedding planner manages to fall in love with and to successfully woo the demure housekeeper, Alice (Tilomata Shome). Their courtship is an all too cutesy duet of misunderstanding and redemption, but true to form, Nair adds an unexpected edge: when Dubey gives Alice his business card she asks, quite innocently, if he has an e-mail address.

Their eventual wedding (was it ever in doubt?) takes place in the family garden only a stone’s throw away from Hemant and Aditi’s boisterous ceremony. Set amid swirling saris and candles galore, the ceremony is the movie’s gorgeous, scruffy set piece, an almost spontaneous outpouring of movement and sound. What’s most notable about it, however, is that just when we expect Nair to finally give her eagle eye a rest and to indulge in the pure spectacle of it all, she only sharpens her scrutiny. In its final moments, Monsoon Wedding becomes a study of glances stolen and exchanged. Some of this is out of necessity: the wedding music (a riotous mixture of traditional Indian folk and Euro/techno pop) grows so loud as to make conversation impossible. The guests simply break out into dance, undeterred by the rain bearing down on them. If you look closely, you’ll see Ria, her hair let down, snatching a glance at a handsome late arrival. A naughty smile dawns on her face. But then, as if awaking from a daydream, Ria disengages and just like that the stolen glimpse is gone forever.