Bryllupsfesten

Norwegian infant terribles alternative film maker duo Svend Wam & Vennerød got a lot of criticism during their heydays in the 70'ies and 80'ies.

Wedding Party ("Bryllupsfesten") is their first intended comedy, as most of their movies back then was seen as funny without intention.

But this is quite funny - intentionally - and has a lot of great Norwegian actors in small roles.

The wedding Party is the upper class wedding where things go wrong. Already before the wedding we understand this heads for catastrophe. The movie is a fun depiction of the yuppie-time back in the 80'ies.

Still we have the awkward lines and bad timing in the filming, and the overplay is there, but in a comedy this works better.

Knut Husebø does a great role as the primus, one of Leif Juster's last films and the film's sub plot is making this a great watch, if you can see through the slightly amateurish filmmaking.

This is the wildly drunk wedding party "Wam & Vennerød-style". When I saw this for the first time in the cinema 34 years ago I was a little but not all amused. Because this is a notch better than I remember it from the cinema at the time. W&V works better as a comedy. And now this is their last film direction together.

This is not too far from the Olsen gang, which is the same type of humor, although here there is yuppie time lurking in the background of the theme. It's great to see several deceased greats, even if the timing is not great in the image changes or in the clip and that some dialogue is a bit stilted, but the dialogue fits better in a comedy. The best part is that the actors clearly had a blast at work.

Knut Husebø is excellent, Heide Steen is full tilt, Monna tandberg is stylish as always. Actually, this is a perfectly fine choice as the first W&V film in Norwegian Film Classics.

I wouldn't have seen this again if it hadn't been for the project "Norwegan Film Classics" which started 2023, where this is movie no. 5. And it's better than I thought earlier, so rating is raised from 4 to 6/10 with a little "age allowance". This is actually very funny to watch. W&V were never boring.

It is likely that the contemporaries judged W&V too harshly, at least in relation to the budgets they made films on, and where would Norwegian cinema have been without them? After all, they showed that there were opportunities for success outside the established film system in Norway.

This movie is made available in 2023 when it was released on interregional Blu-Ray Disk by Norwegian Film Classics as the fifth release in a new series with classics, NFK0005, with subtitles in English, and is supposed to be held in stock for film lovers.

In Wam & Vennerød's only full-blown comedy, the story and the abundances of slapdash characters and relations never make much sense, but at least the film is constantly on the move so that you are spared from lingering on its inadequacies. At its best, Bryllupsfesten has an infantile charm and captures some of the zeitgeist the filmmakers always tried to satirise. At its worst, it's almost unbearable, with an utterly silly script by Vennerød. The comedy is forced, the performances lack spontaneity, and the timing is off. Wam & Vennerød keep piling it on hoping for the best, but there's something sadly uninspired about their work here. They were usually a lot funnier in their more serious works - intentionally or not. Some of the actors manage to conjure up a moment or two of amusement, notably Jon Eikemo, Anne Marie Ottersen and the two veterans in this show, Aud Schønemann and Leif Juster.

A great crazy-comedy from Wam & Vennerød. They show that they can handle more than drama-films. The movie is funny from start to end, and who will forget the scene were Leif Juster tries to escape from the wedding-party to warn the police about two burglars which are planning to rob the house while the party has moved outside.