INDIAN TRADITION, MODERN LIFE SPLENDIDLY CHAOTIC.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

``Monsoon Wedding'' is such an ambitious follow-up to Mira Nair's soft- porn historical ``Kama Sutra'' that it almost feels like the work of a different director - the one whose debut feature - ``Salaam Bombay!'' - indicated so much promise.

With this movie, the India-raised, Harvard-educated, Africa-based filmmaker seems to have gotten every atom of her cosmopolitan sensibility onto the screen in one chaotic but cogent swirl of influences.

This is Nair's attempt to do a Bollywood wedding movie straight: that is, in real psychological terms and realistic situations, but also leaving room for the colorful opulence and song-and-dance interludes that are so much a part of Indian popular cinema. She succeeds marvelously, but doesn't stop there.

``Wedding'' is also a multiperspective look at modern Indian life, mostly as lived by the urban upper-middle class. In a deceptively effortless but ever-probing way, Nair and her curious handheld camera (the great Declan Quinn, of ``Kama Sutra'' and ``Leaving Las Vegas'' fame, did the cinematography) probe how millennia-old traditions and ceremonies continue in a world of rapidly evolving technology, mobility and mores.

The occasion for all the film's frantic yet reflective business is the New Delhi wedding of Aditi Verma (Vasundhara Das). The lovely, eldest daughter of sophisticated Punjabis Lalit (Naseeruddin Shah) and his wife Pimmi (Lillete Dubey), Aditi isn't exactly waiting with bated breath to meet the man whom it's been arranged will marry her in three days, a Houston-based engineer named Hemant Rai (Parvin Dabas). That's because she's still attracted to the dashing, married host of the risque TV talk show she works on, although their affair is for all purposes over.

Aditi's conflict is no barrier, however, to the flood of revelers bearing down on the Verma household from all over the world. In-laws from Dubai, cousins studying in Australia, a beloved and benevolent family friend from the States who may be packing toxic sexual baggage ... all these and many more crowd into the family compound with their expectations, good wishes and irrepressible urges to flirt, shop and nose in on one another's business.

For his part, Lalit runs around like a stereotypically flustered father of the bride. But in Shah's deft hands, the character grows in every direction as we discover his sincere concerns about money, properly hosting the event, his own well-being and, finally, what's best for the individuals he truly cares about.

Lalit is far from the only fascinating person in the movie. Aditi's maiden cousin Ria, beautifully played by Shefali Shetty, carries a dark if somewhat obvious secret around with nicely poised delicacy. And in a pat but still touching subplot, the fast-talking, go-getter event planner P.K. Dube (Vijay Raaz), who always has an excuse for never being able to please Lalit, transcends his basic comic persona as he falls deeply in love with the Vermas' coy housemaid Alice (Tilotama Shome).

As for Aditi and Hemant, in the few stolen moments they have to get to know each other in private, a life's worth of revelations, forgiveness and accommodation are exchanged. Whatever Western prejudices we might bring to the idea of arranged marriage are utterly upended by the desperate but abundant charm with which these attractive young people don't just accept their tradition-dictated fate, but truly come to celebrate it.

In many ways, ``Monsoon Wedding'' can be viewed as a Bollywood movie designed for non-Indian tastes; even the characters' easy patois of Punjabi-Hindi-English, often heard within the same sentences, seems like a sop to the North American market. Yet Nair's interplay of tongues, like the characters' equivalent concerns with prenuptial tattooing, stock market fluctuations, golf tee times, symbolic marigold garlands and a hundred other timeless and timely things of life, is presented in such a way that it seems as naturally and specifically, delightfully Delhian as anyone, from anywhere, could ever want to be.

MONSOON WEDDING - Three and one half stars

(Rated R: language, sex)

Starring: Naseeruddin Shah, Vasundhara Das, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz, Tilotama Shome, Parvin Dabas, Lillete Dubey.

Director: Mira Nair.

Running time: 1 hr. 54 min.

Playing: Regent, Westwood.