Every so often a film comes along that makes you glad to be alive. Every film is trying to reach its audience in some small way, whether to scare us or make us laugh, make us cry or even just feel connected to the world around us. Where Rachel Getting Married is an example of the bastardization of Indian culture in America, Monsoon Wedding is a surprising, joyful expression of all that a Punjabi wedding should be. Simply put, Monsoon Wedding is one of the finest films I have ever seen, displaying rich, sumptuous colors, a talented group of actors working through complicated situations, and a real sense of love and devotion on the part of the filmmaker, Mira Nair.

A modern Indian family wishes to give their daughter Aditi a beautiful wedding for her arranged marriage to a man from Texas, but there's even more going on beneath the surface: Aditi has been having an affair with a married man, her father is struggling financially even without the added wedding expenses, and she's never met the groom. Weddings and funerals are particularly prone to familiar spats and drama, secrets long kept will be revealed, but will any of them find a happy ending?

Monsoon Wedding was completed in a rigorous 30 days, on a budget of only one and a half million dollars, and yet this frugality is absent from the film itself. The film is a brilliant clash of genre and cultures, funny and tumultuous, touching and exotic. Within Monsoon Wedding, old world India and the new modern India are at odds with one another from the first frame to the last, and even as the film was made in 2001, we are witnessing the slow birth of a new generation of Indians. We are brought in days before the wedding, when all is still in disarray and we wonder how things will ever come together, but it is much the same as when one is putting on a play and everything falls into place. The film seems to be almost documentary in nature, a testament to the director's particular interests in cataloguing and interpreting the world around her. Monsoon Wedding is dedicated to preserving a particular slice of time in the culture of the ever-changing India, and though it is comprised of a huge and talented cast who make up the multi-storied film, director Mira Nair juggles the varied stories with ease. Nair's cinematographer Declan Quinn delivers moments of respite, spaces of city-viewing as citizens go about their business drenched in the rain, a softer glimpse of bustling India. It is the smaller moments such as these where Mira Nair takes on the artistic temperament of Wong Kar-Wai or even Terrence Malick, subtle and seductive, beautiful, clean filmmaking at its very best.

In addition to Monsoon Wedding, this box set includes a series of other films that are related in tone or subject. The documentary films included on this special release are accompanied by Mira Nair herself describing and explaining her work, and the shorts are immensely enjoyable, from India Cabaret, a look at the lives of Indian strippers, to more politically charged films dealing with AIDS or gender equality. One begins to get a sense of Nair, that she is a woman who enjoys controversy, who never backs down from a difficult idea or story, and is always willing to accept a risk.

The packaging for the Criterion release is lively and as colorful as the films themselves, and once you've seen the films for yourself, you're going to be glad that you bought the box set so that you can let other people borrow it. Monsoon Wedding has been cleaned up according to the strict Criterion standards and includes audio commentaries, interviews with the actors, greatly improved subtitles, and much more. Pico Iyer's brilliant essay is one of the finest I've ever read from the crafty hands at the Criterion Collection. Iyer effortlessly points out the remarkable correlations between Shakespeare's dramatic and romantic tendencies and Nair's film.

Monsoon Wedding is an unexpected gift, a bright and bold film that exceeds every expectation or limitation placed upon it, and what finer praise can be heaped upon a film?

Monsoon Wedding is available now from the Criterion Collection.

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