Movie Monday February 27: Wedding Season

As I write this, I’m getting ready for my first trip to India for a relative’s wedding. In honor of that, my pick for this week is the rom-com Wedding Season. It’s a fun boy meets girl, they fall in love, family drama ensues movie, all told within an Indian-American wedding season. 

**Warning, mild spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t watched the movie yet, what are you doing?**

Asha (Pallavi Sharda) and Ravi (Suraj Sharma) both have the same problem, their parents want them to settle down. After being set up on a bad first date, they decided to help each other out during the New Jersey Indian wedding season. To avoid prying questions from aunties and their families, Asha and Ravi pretend to be in a relationship and are each other’s date to every wedding. Soon, however, real feelings start to develop. Asha confides in Ravi about her upcoming pitch to her boss at a microfinance start up and Ravi reveals that he dropped out of college to pursue a lucrative career as a DJ. Through a miscommunication, both families think that the couple are going to get married. In the process, secrets are revealed. Ravi has been secretly supporting his family’s struggling restaurant and invested a lot of money in Asha’s pitch. Unable to trust him, Asha breaks it off. Through yet another Indian wedding, this time Asha’s sister Priya’s wedding, the couple eventually find their way back to each other.

Wedding Season is a fun rom-com for anyone familiar or unfamiliar with Indian or Indian-American cultures. The relationships and family dynamics are universal. Societal pressures to take a traditional path, whether in marriage or career, is something everyone can relate to in some way. Many issues in the film, though, are uniquely South Asian. The idea of attending a bunch of weddings in quick succession is also a thing a lot of people in their twenties and thirties understand, though this movie shows that an Indian wedding is a whole other world.

I really enjoyed the performances and chemistry between the two leads. Suraj Sharma’s Ravi and Pallavi Sharda’s Asha are such grounded and real characters for such a short movie. Their unspoken chemistry works really well during the various montages. Though their relationship develops quickly, mostly because of the run time, the moments the audience sees are impactful. We get down to the root of their feelings without a lot of fluff. Would I have loved an extra ten minutes of just the two of them? Sure. Would it be necessary? No.

One aspect of Wedding Season I really liked was the inclusion of an interracial marriages. Priya (Arianna Afsar) is marrying a white American Nick (Sean Kleier). Though much of their relationship and culture clashes are played for comedy, both characters and actors balance humor and emotions. The meddling of both sets of parents is another humorous element that also has a lot of heart involved. For a Netflix movie, there’s a lot of ground covered in subject matter and theme. It could’ve been done poorly, but surprisingly it’s a very well made movie. Hats off to writer Shiwani Srivastava for pulling off a well written and succinct script.

This is a bit of a shorter one this week, though (I’m not even close to finishing packing).

I’d give Wedding Season 7 samosas out of 10.