The Wedding Party

It’s been a while since we’ve had an Aussie suburban comedy and frankly director Amanda Jane and writer Christine Bartlett could have spared us the pain of yet another foray into Antipodean banality.

Developed as part of the Melbourne Film Festival’s production initiative The Wedding Party manages to hit a few resonant notes in its later stages precisely because it stops trying to be funny and actually portrays the various character’s mixed-up emotional life with a degree of honesty, and so achieves some measure of poignancy as a portrait of the less-than-perfect realities of human relationships. This was clearly the film’s aim but Christine Bartlett’s script is neither original nor witty nor insightful enough to realize it, while Amanda Jane’s direction is prosaic and at times graceless and the cast adequate but no more.

The story concerns nice guy Steve (Josh Lawson) who agrees to marry a Russian, Anna (Isabel Lucas) in order to get himself out of debt although he’s still in love with Jacqui (Kestie Morassi). Meanwhile his sister (Nadine Garner) is having troubles with her vagina, his married brother (Geoff Paine) is into S & M and his dad (Steve Bisley) has been booted out by his mother (Heather Mitchell) and is shacked up with a leggy sexpot (Rhonda Burchmore). Although this could be funny material if treated as a farce, as the French would have, the cast are not able to breathe life into the leaden script whilst most of Amanda Jane’s directorial choices only add to the hackneyed results.

The bottom line is that on the basis of its script alone, The Wedding Party should never have been made.

DVD Extras: Behind-the-scenes featurette; Teaser; Theatrical trailer

Available from: Madman

 

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