MOVE over Bollywood historical romances. Move over Merchant Ivory and stiff-collared, stiff-lip British Raj period pieces. Mira Nair is shedding new light on contemporary Indian culture in an exuberant yet poignant portrait of changing Punjabi attitudes to love, marriage and class.

Nair's debut, Salaam Bombay!, had depicted poverty on the streets. This time there is opulence and upper-class affluence, as patriarch Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah) and his wife Pimmi (Lillete Dubey) hastily arrange the lavish marriage of beloved daughter Aditi (Vasundhara Das), with the help, or rather hindrance, of hapless wedding tent co-ordinator PK Dubey (Vijay Raaz), a wheeler-dealer from the emerging middle class.

Amid the frantic preparations, maid Alice (Tilotama Shome) is on hand to ensure a constant supply of food and drink, but trouble is brewing. Aditi is having second thoughts, having agreed to the marriage on the rebound from an aborted love affair with her former boss, a married man. Meanwhile, niece Ria (Shefali Shetty) has her own family secret, accusing a family member of sexual abuse in her childhood.

Nair constructs her ensemble comedy around a trio of relationships: Aditi and her equally wavering groom, whose marriage is finally conducted with the panache of a Bollywood musical fantasy as the rain falls; the unlikely but magical romance of upwardly mobile wedding planner Dubey and innocent housemaid Alice; and Aditi's parents, forced to re-assess their own traditional arranged marriage and troubled deeply by the sudden family revelations.

Nair, employing the hand-held camera school of cinematography for maximum, deliberately intrusive intimacy, combines the fashionable film-making techniques of today with Bollywood's familiar virtues of colour, drama and flamboyant movement. In doing so, the filming matches the story's clash of the traditional and modern as Dogme 95 comes to India, and how, in a delightful, vibrant, bustling story that transcends its Delhi setting for a universal message on the themes of love and family.

Updated: 09:09 Friday, January 18, 2002