A wedding
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | A wedding |
| Original title | A wedding |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1978 |
| length | 125 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Robert Altman |
| script | Robert Altman, John Considine , Allan F. Nicholls , Patricia Resnick |
| production | Robert Altman |
| music | John Hotchkis |
| camera | Charles Rosher junior |
| cut | Tony Lombardo |
| occupation | |
| |
A wedding is an American feature film by Robert Altman from the year 1978 . This comedy film is a social satire designed as an ensemble film with 48 action-bearing roles , in which a wedding is shown from the wedding ceremony to the end of the wedding ceremony and the meeting of the two families creates comical and grotesque situations.
action
Muffin Brenner, daughter from a newly rich southern house , marries Dino Corelli, a half-Italian with maternal roots in a wealthy family in the Midwest . Even during the wedding, things go wrong: The senile bishop can no longer remember the exact course of the rite and, to make matters worse, drops the rings.
Before the wedding guests arrive at the Corellis / Sloans' property to celebrate, a bereavement occurs: Nettie Sloan, Dinos grandmother and head of the family, dies. The few who know about it are painstakingly tried to keep death a secret from the other guests. In the course of the celebration, all sorts of other minor and major catastrophes occur: Tulip, the bride's mother, is massively attacked by an uncle of the groom and notices that she is quite capable of adultery. Buffy, her daughter and the bride's sister, confesses that she is pregnant and that the groom may be the father of the child. The groom's mother, Regina, is a drug addict and longs for her next dose of drugs, which the family doctor, a horny alcoholic, also gives her. Luigi Corelli, her husband and Dino's father, has a secret with him: he used to be a little waiter in Rome before he was allowed to marry into the wealthy Sloan family; but only because Regina was already pregnant by him.
These and many other little stories run through the entire wedding day, until suddenly a great misfortune happens: The bride and groom have disappeared, their new car, with which they wanted to go on their honeymoon, is found after a collision with a tank truck - it has exploded . The shock of the families dissipates very quickly when the bride and groom reappear brightly and cheerfully: It was not they who disappeared with the car, but the ex-friends of the two who fell for each other at the wedding and took possession of the car. Delighted by this "happy" turn, the wedding party turns back to the celebrations.
History of origin
While filming Three Women , Altman interviewed a newspaper reporter and, hungover and suffering from the heat of the day of shooting, when asked what kind of film he was going to make next, he replied that he was filming a wedding. What was meant as a flippant answer, Altman found in retrospect an idea worth pursuing: He wanted to make another film with parts of the cast of Drei Frauen and developed the idea of the confrontation of two foreign families with all their secrets, weaknesses and passions on the occasion of one To film the wedding. However, since Sissy Spacek , Shelley Duvall and Ben Gazzara , whom he would have liked to see in the leading roles, were not available, Altman cast an ensemble of high-profile character actors, above all the silent film star Lillian Gish and Carol Burnett, who was very popular at the time thanks to her own TV show .
Altman devised the framework of a story and laid down the individual characters and their backgrounds with his writers John Considine , Allan Nicholls and Pat Resnick , who all also played small roles in the film. Many of the dialogues only developed while shooting; the actors were encouraged to improvise, and Altman took advantage of the competitive nature of them by giving them the chance to gain more screen exposure to others through spontaneity in performance.
The film was shot on Lake Bluff near Lake Michigan on location in an estate from the 1930s. Only Luigi's underground restaurant had to be built in the studio. The clothes and props such as the wedding gifts were bought in regular specialty shops for wedding supplies.
Reception and aftermath
The majority of the critics reacted disappointedly to this film. Altman's widely recognized masterpiece, Nashville , was too fresh to remember not to have to measure it against this milestone in Altman's work. Variety criticized the film's soullessness and inappropriate humor: “If Nashville is the finest in ensemble film - and it does - then a wedding is the other extreme. Altman's shaky, apparently unstructured style backfires in this comedy-drama. (...) Unlike Nashville, this film lacks the centerpiece. (…) The characters, apart from Lillian Gish as the old, wealthy head of the family and Mia Farrow as the bride's silent sister, are uninteresting and unappealing. (...) Altman's idea of humor turns out to be childish and old-fashioned. John Cromwell plays a senile bishop (...) who is too short-sighted to notice that he speaks to a corpse once in the film. That is hardly astute satire. "
Time Out praises the film for "some wonderful moments in the course of the (...) kaleidoscopic narrative," but "Altman's attempt to repeat the magic formula of Nashville. (...), "have some weaknesses due to the sadly often unimaginative script."
Craig Butler criticizes the “lack of narrative cohesion without which a wedding would be like a series of character studies”, “although some of them are enormously entertaining. There are enough Altman trademarks to be discovered in image and sound to keep the film students engaged, (...) but in the end, that's just enough for a wedding to chug past you for an hour or so, but before that disappointing climax loses steam. "
Roger Ebert praised the film for its ambivalence. The film aims “to mess up our expectations. He takes the richest source of clichés and stereotypes our society has to offer - a wedding in better society - and then cheats away with insane and sometimes brutal satire. (...) Like Altman's other films with a multitude of characters ( MASH , McCabe & Mrs. Miller and the incomparable Nashville ) it cannot simply be classified into one film category. Some viewers will not be satisfied; situations are not created that are resolved in the familiar way. Instead, it contains all of the disintegration and contradictions of life, and then Altman gives everything a deeper meaning in an almost mystical way by confronting us with a catastrophic surprise towards the end of the film. "
In 2004 an opera of the same name was created based on motifs from the film. Altman and Arnold Weinstein wrote the libretto , William Bolcom the music.
Film analysis
The wedding as a focal point of social interaction
Weddings have always been popular motifs in literature and film to depict different social classes and their behavior towards one another on the occasion of a prominent event. Films like Chaplin's The Fine People , Renoir's The Rule of the Game , Cousin, Cousin, and Four Weddings and a Death embraced this possibility.
Altman described his view of the psychological dynamics of wedding celebrations as follows: “It is difficult to pretend when you do not know what to expect. (...). Everyone wants to show their best side. (…) They are all exaggerated because of the importance of the event (…), then they have a few drinks (…) and over time they get bored. The serenity and the joy collapse and a few other things come to light. ” Accordingly, his characters act in their self-portrayal according to socio-psychological patterns, as described by Erving Goffman : They try to fill a certain social role, but their interaction with others is always right again according to what the respective situation and their respective interaction partner requires of them.
A wedding draws the potential for its comedy from the different attitudes and values of two wealthy families: The Sloans / Corellis are long-established money nobility from the Midwest, the Brenners nouveau riche southerners. Not only do the two family clans collide due to mutual prejudices, the cracks between the generations are also noticeable: while the older generation indulges in their vices such as alcohol and drugs, the younger generation, in their openly displayed promiscuity , poses as dangerous for them Preservation of family structures. Altman addresses the taboos, repression and the compulsive and addictive behavior of his protagonists and explores how far it is possible for the characters bound by social constraints to break out of their roles.
In addition to the tensions that arise due to money or the preservation of appearances, the racist prejudices of the entire wedding party also resonate : Luigi, the Italian waiter who once impregnated Regina, was allowed to join the Sloane family, but the contact to he was denied his family in Italy. The Sloan family's African American servant apparently has an affair with one of Nettie's daughters; an embarrassing fact for the family that must be kept a secret during the celebration. Ultimately, Altman also convicts the viewer of latent racist feelings: When the viewer learns that it was not the bride and groom but the unlikable friends who perished in the traffic accident, the viewer is as happy as with the relieved wedding party; an effect planned by Altman: "So I point my finger at the audience and say: You are exactly such racists as they are!"
When asked whether he was not too strict or even contemptuous with his protagonists, Altman replied that he even liked the characters very much; his paternal family was very similar to the Sloanes and his matriarchal grandmother was just as matriarchal as Nettie.
Aspects of comedy in film
The comedy in the film results from absurd and irritating events such as the death of the grandmother, which must be kept secret. The different reactions of the guests when they finally found out about it range from desperation from the nurse, laconism from the general practitioner and anger from the son-in-law to abysmal irritation from the daughter when she first learns that Nettie is dead, followed by hers To hear sister that she had just been with her and that she was doing well.
In addition to such finely played out comic nuances, the film does not shy away from slapstick-like comedy, which reminds the author Thomas Kein of the television series The Simpsons , which, however, did not open until eleven years after Altman's film. When, for example, a college friend dragged the drunk groom into the shower to sober him up, the bride happened to join them and had doubts as to whether her newly wed husband was gay after all. In addition to some effects that some critics perceive as flat, such as the bride's pincers, which she bares when she says `` I do '', or the short-sighted bishop who ends up on Nettie's deathbed looking for a toilet, there are also some touchingly funny scenes, for example when the bride's mother meets her overweight admirer in the garden or when Luigi asks his dead mother-in-law to finally release him from his control.
Cinematic means
Geometry of the facade and destruction
At the beginning of the film, Altman stages both the wedding ceremony and the wedding preparations in a parallel montage operatic to festive fanfare music in strictly geometric images. Both the kitschy neo-Gothic church and the Sloanes estate are shown as an expression of the family facade that was initially maintained in strict symmetry . As the plot progresses, this symmetry of the images breaks, analogous to the collapse of the beautiful appearance of the wedding party, only to find themselves again deceptively at the end: the family peace is apparently restored when it is certain that the bridal couple is not dead.
Distance and approach
Altman shoots in a quasi-documentary manner , as if he were out as a society reporter at the party, using a hidden camera to pick out the pairings that seem most promising to him in terms of the well-kept secrets behind the facade. Altman creates the necessary distance by using larger focal lengths , which show the characters in the background sharply, while people in the foreground scurry through the picture out of focus. Altman then succeeds in getting closer to the characters by using the zoom , with which he puts the faces in the focus of the viewer in emotionalized moments.
Sound and music
As is usually the case with Altman, the tone is realistically implemented. Against the polyphonic background of the babble of voices from the wedding guests, Altman also uses one of his trademarks, the overlapping dialogues.
The music is used ironically to cynically in the film: next to the wedding fanfares, for example, after a cut from the dead grandmother to the dancing wedding party, the song You make me feel so young can be heard; the Leonard Cohen song Bird On A Wire , intoned by a wedding guest, symbolizes the - futile - desire for freedom.
Awards
A wedding was nominated for Best Director and Best Screenplay at the 1979 BAFTA Awards, and Best Foreign Film at César 1979. Carol Burnett received a nomination for Best Supporting Actress at the 1979 Golden Globes. At the 1978 San Sebastián International Film Festival she was named Best Actress.
literature
- Peter W. Jansen and Wolfram Schütte (eds.): Robert Altman , Film 35 series, Hanser Verlag Munich, Vienna 1981, ISBN 3-446-13273-2 .
- Giancarlo Castelli and Mauro Marchesini: Robert Altman , kinoheute 4, edited by Rolf Giesen, Verlag Klaus Guhl, Berlin 1978, ISBN 3-88220-107-X .
- Thomas Klein and Thomas Koebner (Eds.): Robert Altman - Farewell to the Myth America , Bender Verlag Mainz 2006, ISBN 3-9806528-3-1 .
- David Thompson (Ed.): Altman on Altman , Faber and Faber, London 2006, ISBN 0-571-22089-4 .
Web links
- A wedding in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- A wedding in the online film database
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Thompson pp. 109-113
- ↑ Critique of Variety ( Memento of October 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Time out's review
- ↑ Review by Craig Butler on allemovie.com
- ^ Review by Roger Ebert
- ↑ a b c d e f Hans Günther Pflaum : Annotated filmography in Jansen / Schütte pp. 142–150
- ↑ a b c Thomas Klein: Stars and Ensembles in Klein / Koebner pp. 193–196
- ↑ a b Thomas Koebner: From crazy and madhouses: Polemical satires - the 1970s in Klein / Koebner pp. 33-35