Director
Tom Dey
Cast
Suraj Sharma, Pallavi Sharda, Arianna Afsar, Rizwan Manji
What’s The Story
Pressured by their immigrant parents to find spouses, two Indian-Americans (Suraj Sharma and Pallavi Sharda) pretend to date in order to survive a summer of weddings – but find themselves falling for each other as they struggle to balance who they are with who their parents want them to be.
Watch Trailer
What’s Good
Feel Good Mushy Romcom
Romcoms are a way to restore our faith in romance and innate goodness in people. It also makes us laugh all the way through, sometimes even making us say out loud, “This can happen only in the movies”. ‘Wedding Season’ ticks off all these checkboxes and comes out with a superlative sense of feel-good at the end of it.
The lead actors Pallavi Sharda and Suraj Sharma flaunt their well-practised American accents. Honestly, they felt like an odd pairing in the trailers, but when you watch the two perform together, their chemistry just fits through. Not just in the gooey romantic scenes, but even in the emotional scenes where the two are even fighting against each other, they look and feel like a real couple, and that’s a very hard balance to get onscreen.
Meena Singh’s cinematography shows the New York of your dreams. With the beautiful locales, she has managed to make you feel like you’re a part of these onscreen families and are walking side by side with these characters.
Tom Dey managed to bring every possible Indian element to the film. Whether it was the awkwardness of coming out in front of your parents or the angst of wanting to focus on work while your parents want you to get married – everything is relatable. Dey has managed to get that relatability factor going well.
Editor David L. Bertman has kept the edit of the movie crisp and kept the flow going perfectly at all junctures. There is not a single shot in the film where you would feel that it was too overdone, or it was dragging.
What’s Bad
Indianised Rip-Off Of ‘Holidate’
Netflix usually doesn’t have rip-offs, but ‘Wedding Season’ is eerily similar to Emma Roberts and Luke Bracey's ‘Holidate’. This can’t even be allowed considering the makers are not turning an English film into Hindi for the Indian audiences, rather both the films are Hollywood-made and are in chaste English. Just that in this one the setting is with an Indian family, which wasn’t the case in ‘Holidate’. While in ‘Holidate’ Emma Roberts and Luke Bracey decide to be fake girlfriend-boyfriend so that they don’t have to spend the holidays throughout the year alone and keep answering the family’s questions, ‘Are you dating someone?’ In ‘Wedding Season’ just the holidays have been changed to weddings. Pallavi Sharda and Suraj Sharma are tired of answering every near-or-far family member about when they’re getting married. They decide to be a fake couple so that families wouldn’t bother them about marriage, and they can pass by the wedding season in peace. What’s surprising is that both the films Netflix and are available to be viewed on Netflix.
Next up, why do all Hollywood-made Indian films have a terrible dance number at the end? These always end up being so bad that it just makes you guffaw throughout. ‘Wedding Season’ also does its fair share of that Bollywood dance track at the end where everyone is trying to do a synchronised step and making it look oh-so-hilarious. Dey could have selected a better way to showcase the end titling of his movie, rather than do it via this laugh-worthy dance number.
Verdict
If you’re a fan of mushy holiday romcoms, then this film is definitely for you. For the rest, simply avoid! I am going with 2 stars.
