This is a Swiss French film aimed for Europeans more than "the outer world". The idea is not exactly new: try to show the "creaks inside the happy surface". And what better to dig holes onto that a rich bourgeois Swiss dysfunctional family :)!
You have them all: the unemployed sour father (Michel) the best actor in an all together good cast, the hysterical and always negative Claire (elegant Aurore Clement), her beautiful melancholic daughter (Delphine Chuillot), Liên, the Vietnamese adopted son (who is always trying to "blend in") , his mum (Man Thu), the true center of the film, for which this farce is made, the funny uncle, always laughing, the unusual priest, even Michel's new girlfriend, tacky even in the house decoration.
I mean, you are thrown in the classical "unusual characters", perfect for the "look how strange life is" feeling forced upon us by the writer & director Jean-Stéphane Bron. The language aspect is overemphasized, like not offering any translation of her mum's speech at their home nor at the wedding. Or the party itself, the giggling uncle, reluctant until parody sons, negative to caricature mum, grouchy dad. Or the African musicians at the wedding. Come on! I've seen American and Italian film with the same topics, I am sure the reader could offer more examples. At the Italian case the foreigners were Indian, and they drank and swore all the time, to "comic" effect. What does that change besides showing chauvinism?
What remains of this engaging if cold film after the "strange circumstances that make everything even worse"? The good thing is that there's no sugar coated morale. The bad one maybe that there is not much else.
The bride Sarah (Rohrbach) is totally absent, I think she says two sentences during the whole film. Her joy during the trip (somewhat similar to Titanic's famous scene) is somewhat forced, like if "made for the publicity". Can anybody realize the party was a farce?).
The couple's sons are Catherine who seems to have inherited her mum perpetually aloof temper) and Jacques, who looks sad almost all the time. He at least can show he's got "blood in his veins", like at the speech on the wedding, or the fight later. Or by making this stupid "documentary" we witness. Funny idea, thou.
Her sister is the most cold person conceivable, looks like an adult teenager, always slouching, barely speaks, carrying her Adidas coat even at the family's wedding picture.
I would have liked Liên to at least have an opinion, one, during the wedding, while the family was fighting at the kitchen or when Claire starts singing (probably the worse scene in the movie).
But I guess that's how Swiss are. Or what they want to believe :). Notice hardly anybody touches each other. The two mums hug near the end, that shows "they've accepted each other". In our Latin American countries, this would have happened in the first day.
It was part of this "minimalist" setting that we don't know much about the characters. Jacques barely mentions something about a hospital, Catherine even less, Claire works at ... an ONG? They don't have a family surname, like Dostoievski's characters.
When the furniture (family table) is going to be important that may well be there is not much to say in a film, for a quick & easy comic relief. Like the "unexpected" rain, or the ugly ceramic dog, or when you see a multitude of wedding cakes that of course, some fight will ensue and there will be food splattered across everywhere. At the expensive kitchen of the sad first world, of course. "The Swiss have problems too, you know?". The whole film is in the beginning, when they show a creaking corny Swiss postcard. The film is not "difficult" but I guess it would benefit from a 2nd viewing. Like the importance of the family coming together at "Zermatt", that was a family holiday retreat "in the good old days". That's why we are shown that silly mountain, approaching, nothing, then... the mountain! (for many seconds). Only then the Viets and the Swiss make amends.
I liked this film. Watch it, but don't expect anything "out of the world" if you know what I mean.
