Reem Kherici as Juliette and Nicolas Duvauchelle as Mathias
Basically this is a French Wedding Planner. You know how it goes, the wedding planner falls in love with the groom but instead of a meet-cute where they have some sexual tension here they have a one-night stand at a costume party. Sure, whatever. Also to add more conflict in the mix the wedding planner/mistress (movie’s word), Juliette and the bride-to-be, Alexia were childhood class mates and by that I mean Alexia was a pretty rich blond mean child and Juliette was fat and poor.
So there is the dynamic of the characters, unfortunately it’s all presented as very shallow and artificial, like this movie needed another round of rewrites and editing to the screenplay. Aside from Juliette’s connection to her childhood/inner child and her alcoholic mother nothing about that seems to impact her life or personality, she seems pretty together and confident.
There is nothing to really suggest that Mathias, the groom, is at all unhappy being with Alexia except that he has been with her for five years but didn’t think of marriage until Alexia found Juliette’s professional card in his pocket and assumed they were getting married. Alexia is a sort of bitchy and shallow but not deserving of Mathias’ wishy-washy/lukewarm attitude. Really it’s just bad character development.
For instance the movie tells us that Mathias doesn’t have a family, ok fine but what happened to them? Are the dead or was there a falling out? I he going to reveal the truth to Juliette there by strengthening their connection? Nope, it’s a taboo subject never brought up again. He might has well have a family if it’s not important to the plot otherwise why bring it up? The movie isn’t at all that interested in flushing out the characters and their interactions beyond smiling, drinking and the wacky antics they get into.
Which bring us to the humor. Now French humor is a little different, they like misfortune to happen to other people, other people’s pain is funny and BOY does this movie take that and run with it, with train and throws it over a cliff and then breaks its teeth just for good measure. And here are some that occur in the move; Mathias is forced into kissing a man to keep his trite with Juliette a secret, a Bride’s gets her mouth smashed during her wedding after a cross falls on her, Alexia is hit in the face with a tennis ball and breaks for front teeth, Alexia’s father’s prized wine collection is broken by Juliette as she tries to hide after her Mathias are nearly caught having sex again in Alexia’s father’s house, and many more with one being so awful I nearly stopped the movie. This is a style humor that I don’t find very funny but maybe if the characters were better it could have worked. Like I didn’t care that Alexia got her teeth smashed in. There was no feeling it, it was supposed to be funny but that joke land on it’s face much like that random bride whose face was literally smashed which was also not funny.
While I did finish this movie it wasn’t good or enjoyable. Perhaps if you want just a mindless movie to fill the void for a little over and hour then if’s a fine but you could want anything else and get the result with your time.
Site Note– While I ‘m happy I at least did the four reviews I set out to do this month but it came down to the wire. While like the idea of reviewing random movie streaming on Netflix I don’t think I will continue. I had mentioned reviewing French Musical in during the month of August, as I have wanted to do that for a while, the truth is my August is looking busy so I’m going to hold off on that for now. In the meantime I want to at least try to do more Hunchback content even if it’s stupid, like 100 layers of Esmeralda. So no more random movie reviews for a while. Not sure how frequently I will post but I will try and post something once a week at the very least and something related to Hunchback.