Bicycle Bride

"She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life." So said Susan B. Anthony, one of America's best-known feminists of the 19th century. Twenty-year-old Beena is a product of America and not just any America but the one in San Francisco, California, a traditional spot for self-reinvention. Beena is now twenty and her Indian immigrant mother Billo has decided that she's ripe to be a bride, as Shakespeare might put it. Like many a first-generation American, Beena has other ideas, one of which is to master the unstable and highly metaphoric contraption known as a bicycle while another is to attend college and yet another is to become better acquainted with James Dean, a dishy student from Sweden who probably endures the inevitable jokes about his name with Nordic stoicism. It's a traditional immigrant's tale with a comic and lighthearted touch, not to mention some exceptional costumes and a wedding dance scene both joyful and mildly erotic, a celebration of human life and its presumed continuance.