Arranged Marriage
A confused and confusing... horror? comedy? Who's to say? ... about a modern Indian-American woman whose family's focus on tradition turns murderous.
Many movies are confusing; some are just confused.
They’re not sure what they want to be or do. People become so focused on getting the movie made that they lose track of what they set out to do. There are creative differences and budgetary pressures. Production shoots can be chaotic. Then it all gets handed over to an editor and post-production team whose job is to turn it into something coherent. Sometimes they can, sometimes they can’t.
“Arranged Marriage” is one of those hopeless cases.
Directed and written by Anoop Rangi, it’s the story of Kamali (Megha Sandhu), an Indian-American woman on the verge of graduating from college who’s suddenly surprised by her parents presenting her with an arranged marriage. She’s grown up in the States with a fully Westernized perspective, and resists the marriage — to an unappealing dweeb named Rootoo (Jude Holmes).
Kamli refers to him as a “FOB,” which I had to Google to learn is slang for “fresh off the boat,” aka Asian immigrants to America who have made little attempt to assimilate.
I was also put off by the opening sequence where Kamli is studying in the university bathroom with a friend and excuses herself to go to the bathroom, where she produces from her purse an enormous tub of “whitening cream,” which she slathers all over herself. I thought this disturbing and absurd, but Google came to the rescue again — it’s a common product used mostly by Asians who want to bleach their skin whiter. Heck, you can buy some on Amazon.
Weird. Pasty folks like me want to be darker, and brown people want to get whiter.
I bring this up to talk about the film’s only worthwhile aspect, its look at the clash between Indian immigrants and the predominant white culture. Kamali is stuck between those two worlds, enjoying her closeness to her family but not their adherence to hidebound traditions.
There are some genuinely funny sequences here and there in the film, stuck in between long, languid talky scenes interrupted by the occasional gruesome murder or beat-down. It starts out as more or a less a straight horror film, with Kamali bearing witness to several killings, then segues into a clashing culture comedy, a family drama and a few other pieces in between.
People also occasionally perform Bollywood-esque feats of magic or trickery, like making objects float across the room or a slap sending someone spinning. These events go unexplained, as if they are naturally occurring.
Kamali has a boyfriend, Clive (Jordan Williams), who wants to ingratiate himself into her family despite the pending marriage. This earns a vicious beating from her father (Kavi Raz), her uncle and nephew. Strangely, Clive does not press charges or seem even particularly bothered by being hospitalized, explaining it as part of their culture that he, as a privileged white dude, needs to work harder to understand.
Of course, we’ll later find that Clive’s uber-wokeness is just a clown mask he wears for convenience, and he’ll start firing off ignorant, racist taunts with the best of them.
Watching “Arranged Marriage” is an exercise in veering back and forth between tones and emotions, seemingly without rhyme or reason. At one point Kamali becomes suspicious that her father and family are orchestrating these murders, even going to the police for a bizarre encounter with a detective wearing a Hitler mustache. Then, just couple scenes later, she’ll be insisting that their car exploding could’ve been the result of a mechanical failure.
This is we never come to care about Kamali, or know how to feel about her family. At times they seem to operate more like a mafia than a loving clan, and not in the cuddly Corleone way. The fact the white antagonists (and one token Black man) never even seem to conceive of fighting back makes them seem less scary than pathetic.
“Arranged Marriage” could’ve been an interesting story, that of a girl from a traditional family trying to navigate the roadmap they’ve laid out for her against the backdrop of an American life. Instead it’s a strange, dizzying journey that leaves us scratching our heads, wondering what that was all about.