Monsoon Wedding set to win UK hearts

london: in the depths of the january gloom, britain is set to celebrate a red-and-gold indian monsoon wedding from friday as mira nair's film goes to general release across the country in a unique bi-lingual format and marketing experiment. "we've tied up with the asian film distributor eros to do separate targeted marketing of two separate versions of monsoon wedding, one in hindi, the other in english.it's never been done before, to actually have the same film in two different languages in the same cinema hall," pete buckingham, deputy chief executive of film four, monsoon wedding's uk distributors, told the times of india. the experiment, says buckingham, is a hugely expensive, logistically difficult exercise aimed at bringing white and asian audiences into cinema halls simultaneously and taking monsoon wedding into the big league of this year's top 25 grossers. industry pundits say the "experiment" is signficant for bollywood's "crossover" aspirations with aamir khan publicly stating last year that he wanted lagaan to cross the white-asian divide and become the hindi crouching tiger, hidden dragon. lagaan was shown nation-wide, sometimes in cinema halls with a dominant white clientele. but now, the monsoon wedding experiment will unite and carve up the british market at the same time, because critics say, white mainstream audiences cannot be lumped with asians and vice versa. "they might watch the same thing but each doesn't want sub-titles and both need different advertising strategies," agrees an advertising executive associated with the english-language monsoon wedding campaign. distributor film four admits it needs eros to cater to asian audiences, even as buckingham describes his fond hopes for the film: "we expect at least half-a-million people to see it, and for it to make at least 600,000 pounds if not one million or more at the box office. we have a feeling it might do well". that "feeling" appears to be shared by many who matter. "mira is an important international film-maker and monsoon wedding was the best audience success of any film i've introduced at the london film festival," adrian wootton, the festival director, told this paper. the british media, with its tendency to pigeon-hole hindi films as jangly bollywood ghetto flicks, is over the moon. "punjabi woody allen without allen's self-consciousness," intoned the grave sunday telegraph. "this film is a tonic...funny, gutsy," bubbled the guardian and the london evening standard told its readers to go out and watch the "absorbing altmanesque overview of family life". so, is nair's new film more of the same, yet another phase in the saga of recent commercial success enjoyed by hindi films such as lagaanand british asian films such as east is east? "yes and no", says an emphatic wootton, cautioning that "monsoon wedding is more than just a strange exotic film". critics say nair in january will be a foretaste of an "exciting" 11 months for indian films and indian diaspora cinema. the market's appetite has been whetted for british gujarati asif kapadia's award-winning the warrior, shekhar kapur's four feathers and bend it like beckham from gurinder chadha, director of bhaji on the beach. "india is just not a marginal business anymore," says wootton, promising a london retrospective of nair's work in april.