The Glamorous Concept of Wedding Planning in Films
Many kinds of Bollywood mainstream movies, Hollywood chic flicks and romantic comedies carry the concept of installing a grand wedding near the end of the film, or some sort of event planning that throughout the comic plot leads to a grand event near the end. This concept only adds to the fun bits of a movie, kind of glamorizing whatever story line they are working with, because the whole idea of a wedding is always related to pretty details, fancy dresses, and beautiful looking production design. There are many examples of such kinds of movies. A prominent one in Hollywood is called “The Wedding Planner”. It follows the life of a successful wedding planner who puts fancy weddings together for other people and has a long term goal of one day enjoying her own fairytale wedding. Another example is “The Monsoon Wedding” which is a film by Mira Nair that explores many concepts of family life, tragedy, and drama all happening in a wedding house and end with a grand wedding.
A recent Bollywood release called “Band, Baaja, Baraat” is also a romantic comedy about two lovers who have a wedding planning business and near the climax of the film turn against each other and run competing companies. This was yet another example of a typical love story taking place with a festive, eventful, wedding planning background. Two older Hollywood films “Father of the Bride” and “Father of the Bride 2” (the sequel) are also emotional stories about the pain a father goes through when his daughter is being wedded away. It comically explores the father’s attempt to become a partial wedding planner trying to subconsciously pull his daughter away from the idea of marrying her fiance.
Although the concept of wedding films has almost been over played in both Hollywood and Bollywood cinemas, it does not seem to be wearied out. I find a distinct reason behind this. There is a lot you can do with a storyline revolving around weddings, wedding planning, or even in general event planning. Not only does this kind of story line always promise a grandeur larger than life end to a movie where the event finally plays out, but also provides so many different types of conflicts that could be used by the film such as competing careers, sibling rivalries, parent and children relationships, other varieties of family dramas, and your basic chic flick variety of bridesmaids wars and love stories between the bridesmaid and the best man.