Arya News - From Hollywood’s white-wedding fantasies to Bollywood songs that became wedding choreography and Bangladeshi dramas built around weddings, cinema has taught Bangladeshis what a wedding should look like.
DHAKA – I have recently spent an unreasonable amount of time looking at wedding references. A cousin is getting married, which means I have become familiar with the strange ecosystem of screenshots, mood boards, saved Instagram posts and photographs of weddings that have apparently set the standard for what a wedding should look like. The more I look, the more obvious it becomes that most of our references are borrowed. We have been watching fictional weddings for so long that cinema has quietly become part of the way we imagine the real thing.
Hollywood gave us the white wedding fantasy long before Instagram existed. “The Parent Trap” gave us the enormous, picturesque ceremony that looks like it belongs in a storybook. “Bride Wars” turned wedding planning itself into a competitive sport, complete with impossible venues and increasingly elaborate details. “27 Dresses” made us intimately familiar with the bridesmaid’s wardrobe, the wedding chaos and the strange emotional ecosystem surrounding a bride. “Mamma Mia!” gave an entire generation a Mediterranean wedding fantasy so effective that an island, a blue dress and a flower crown could suddenly qualify as a complete aesthetic.
And then there are the weddings that became visual landmarks in themselves. Bella’s minimalist wedding in “Breaking Dawn – Part 1” made a generation of Twilight fans obsess over her Carolina Herrera dress. “Crazy Rich Asians” gave us the sort of wedding where even the aisle requires production design, with Araminta’s spectacular walk through water becoming one of the most instantly recognisable modern movie weddings. The scene was so carefully constructed that the wedding almost felt like a fashion editorial with a love story attached.
Bollywood has arguably done more than any other film industry to make the wedding a participatory art form. It did not merely show us weddings. It gave us songs to perform at them. “Mehndi Laga Ke Rakhna” from “Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge” has long since escaped its original film and become wedding vocabulary. “Bole Chudiyan” from “Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham” is practically a choreographic inheritance. “Didi Tera Devar Deewana” from “Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!” has survived decades of cousins who were not even alive when the film came out. “Maahi Ve” from “Kal Ho Naa Ho”, “London Thumakda”, “Gallan Goodiyaan” and “Kaala Chashma” followed the same path. These songs are particularly powerful because they were designed for exactly what weddings eventually became: large groups of people performing happiness together. A film choreographer creates the original routine. A wedding choreographer watches it. Someone learns the hook step. Someone changes the hook step. Ten years later, somebody’s aunt is doing a surprisingly accurate version of it at a reception. Cinema creates the template; weddings keep remixing it.
Then there are the clothes. “Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham” gave us an entire wardrobe of wedding references. “Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani” gave us Aditi’s wedding, with its destination setting, jewel-toned outfits and deliberately effortless extravagance. “Veere Di Wedding” offered a more contemporary, fashion-conscious wedding fantasy. “2 States” gave us a different pleasure altogether: the wedding as a collision of two cultural aesthetics. And sometimes one outfit becomes more memorable than the wedding itself, because cinema has spent decades making us pause the screen and think, I want that.
This is where Bangladeshi cinema and television become especially interesting. Our own screen culture has given us a different, more familiar collection of wedding images. Bangladeshi films and television dramas have repeatedly used weddings, engagements and family celebrations as spaces for romance, comedy and visual glamour. The appeal of these scenes is often less about extravagant production and more about recognition: the clothes look like clothes we might actually wear, the families resemble families we know, and the celebrations carry the slightly chaotic warmth of events we have attended ourselves. The romantic comedy “Jodi Kintu Tobuo”, for instance, literally begins around an engagement and was described at the time as a colourful take on the local rom-com, with a wedding functioning as the central spectacle. Bangladeshi television has also made the wedding such a familiar comic and romantic setting that there are entire Eid dramas built around it; “Wedding Diary” and “Happy Wedding” are only two recent examples.
And that is perhaps why our wedding references can feel so wonderfully mixed. One person wants something that looks like a Bollywood sangeet. Someone else wants the polished simplicity of a Hollywood wedding. Someone wants the flowers from a Bangladeshi drama they watched years ago. Someone has saved a bride’s jewellery from Instagram. Someone has found a song from a 1990s film. Someone else has a cousin who knows a choreographer who can teach everyone the steps. There is no single source any more. There is simply the enormous visual archive we have accumulated by watching things.
Cinema has also taught us that every wedding needs a moment. The bride walked in. The friends surprised the couple. The groom’s entrance. The family dance. The dramatic reveal of the outfit. The song everyone knows. The photograph where everyone looks inexplicably perfect. These moments have become so familiar that we now plan them in advance. Weddings have trailers, teaser videos, pre-wedding shoots, choreographed entrances and carefully constructed photographs. We have essentially taken the grammar of cinema and applied it to real life. The pre-wedding shoot might be the funniest example. For decades, films showed couples running through fields, walking along beaches, staring at each other beside lakes and standing dramatically under conveniently cinematic sunsets. We have now turned those scenes into a professional service. Even the mood board itself is cinematic. We save frames instead of photographs. We refer to colour palettes. We identify lighting. We want “something like this” without always remembering where the “this” came from.
Of course, fictional weddings are much easier to admire because they have editors. Nobody in “Crazy Rich Asians” is checking whether the florist has arrived. Nobody in “Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!” appears to be worrying about the seating arrangement. Nobody in “Mamma Mia!” is calling someone because 14 guests have changed their dinner preferences. Real weddings contain logistics. Movies contain lighting. And perhaps that is why we keep borrowing from them. A real wedding is an event that happens once. A fictional wedding can be paused, replayed, screenshotted, copied and choreographed at someone else’s wedding twenty years later. That is the strange afterlife of an iconic wedding scene. It stops belonging to the movie. It becomes someone’s outfit reference. Someone’s first-dance song. Someone’s entrance idea. Someone’s décor inspiration. Someone’s cousin’s choreography. Which means that when we plan weddings today, we are rarely starting from scratch. We are pulling pieces from a shared pop-cultural memory: a hairstyle from an actress, a flower arrangement from Pinterest, a choreography from YouTube.
The final wedding may look completely original. It probably isn’t. It is a little bit of everything we have ever watched and thought we wanted exactly that. And honestly, that might be the most entertaining thing about wedding planning: somewhere between the spreadsheets and the screenshots, we realise we have been collecting wedding references our entire life.