One of the most remarkable things about Jonathan Demme's film, "Rachel Getting Married," is the deliberate, multi-ethnic array of people who comprise the wedding party and family friends. The soundtrack not only reflects this UN-style gathering, but co-mingles and cross-pollinates world sounds as many types of musicians group for spontaneous jams over the wedding weekend.
(image: Sony Pictures Classics)
We're left to guess that Sidney, the groom, a musician, experiments with world sounds, and so his like-minded friends can't help but jam and experiment during their Connecticut weekend with the happy couple. But it wasn't completely clear why the bride and her maids decided to dress in saris.
One song on the soundtrack is titled "New York Style Yoga" (it's actually a track from Black Bombay, and---guilty as charged---I've used it in my own yoga classes) and it fits right into this scene.
It's as if we'll all know what this joyful mix means, and need no further explanation. We'll know that every marrying couple wants world musicians to make our party pump; that every bride wants yards of gold-bordered silk to frame her quasi-Indian lifestyle (a Hindi-Connecticutian?), that yoga is so known, so done, and so much a part of our lives that we don't even have to explain that most of the women at the wedding, and some of the men, (probably; we assume) practice yoga. (That might explain the saris.)
Don't you do yoga? Doesn't everyone we know? Here comes the bride, and Om Namah Shivaya.