The Wedding Review

Wedding, The
It's the wedding day from hell as a father of the bride pays an increasingly severe price for his daughter's less-than-happy day.

by David Parkinson |
Published on
Release Date:

14 Dec 2007

Running Time:

109 minutes

Certificate:

TBC

Original Title:

Wedding, The

Vaguely inspired by Andrzej Wajda's same-named 1973 adaptation of Stanislaw Wyspianski's turn-of-the-century play, this is a frantic, fluid-flushed farce, in which father of the bride Marian Dziedziel pays an increasingly severe price for Tamara Arciuch's less-than-happy day.

It's difficult to know whether funding the event through a series of dodgy deals or getting Arciuch's dumped boyfriend, Maciej Stuhr, to video proceedings is the more disastrous decision, as the camera picks up each new humiliation with a persistence that's as relentlessly cruel as it's bleakly hilarious.

Ripping into the hypocrisies and aspirations of post-Communist society, debuting director Wojciech Smarzowski denounces everything from the law and the church to the mafia and the European Union, as the guests wallow in a celebratory cesspool of blood, vomit, toilet overflow and cheap Slovakian vodka.

Overflowing with the bile of human unkindness, this is dystopic view of Polish society lurches from one calamity to the next with a savage inevitability that's wince-inducingly compelling.
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