Namrata Singh Gujral's 5 Weddings finds a clever way to weave together rituals with observational comedy. The movie stars Rajkummar Rao as Harbhajan, a Chandigarh police inspector saddled with ensuring that visiting American journalist Shania (Nargis Fakhri) doesn't get up to any trouble. Shania is half-Indian and half-American, and has been assigned by her fashion website to do a story on Indian wedding ceremonies.

Big fat Indian weddings are over-hyped, over-exposed affairs in popular culture thanks to bloated - and repeated - Bollywood renditions. They are the worst thing that an Indian-American filmmaker can single out as a marker of her ethnic roots. So it is for Los Angeles-based fashion journo Shania Dhaliwal (Nargis Fakhri), the female protagonist of Namrata Singh Gujral's first directorial feature, 5 Weddings, an inert comedy of manners done in by a pedestrian premise.