Nida Manzoor’s fizzing comedy joins cinema’s long procession of disrupted nuptials, from The Philadelphia Story to Muppets Most Wanted
I blame the movies for the tense, wilful shiver I feel at every wedding ceremony I’ve ever attended – when the priest or officiator opens the floor for objections, and a few seconds of awkward, semi-amused silence ensues. What a chaotic thrill it must be to speak up in that moment! I never would, of course, and have never seen anyone else do so. But in cinema, nuptials are made to be sabotaged as often as not, and by forces more malicious than the tepid British summer. The “stop the wedding!” film is virtually its own subgenre. Nida Manzoor’s fizzy, raucous comedy Polite Society is a pleasingly unusual addition to its ranks.
The wedding targeted in Manzoor’s film isn’t a victim of romantic discord or envy. Instead, it’s the bride’s sister who simply believes it’s a bad idea all round. Martial arts-obsessed London teenager Ria (a delightful Priya Kansara) looks up to her older sister, art student Lena (Ritu Arya), seeing them both as rebels against cultural and familial convention. When Lena drops out of art school and gets engaged to a seemingly nice, respectable boy, Ria feels positively betrayed. Only one thing for it: to stop the wedding, in increasingly kick-arse fashion. It’s an anarchic but endearing quest, and outlandish wish-fulfilment for any viewer who has wanted to advise a loved one against marrying a total rotter, but didn’t dare.
It’s the sweeter, whiz-bang counterpart to Noah Baumbach’s vinegary black comedy Margot at the Wedding, in which a quietly calculating Nicole Kidman descends on her estranged sister’s Long Island wedding weekend like an angel of death in a salmon-pink sunhat, determined to seed her unhappiness in everyone else. With said sister played by a fiercely snappish Jennifer Jason Leigh, it’s an equally matched war of sharp words, with Jack Black’s schlubby groom caught in the crossfire.
It’s the romantic comedy, of course, where weddings are ruined with most cheerful abandon, never more joyously than in George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story, a perfectly frosted tiered fruitcake of a farce where Katharine Hepburn’s brittle bride-to-be is oh so suavely pestered by her ex Cary Grant. The film’s positively Shakespearean air of all’s-well-that-ends-well comedy is endlessly imitated to this day, and rarely matched.
The 90s was an especially rich era for such successors. Mike Newell and Richard Curtis’s still-buoyant Four Weddings and a Funeral shook up the formula by keeping us guessing as to which wedding would go awry, while PJ Hogan’s clever, surprisingly sharp-clawed My Best Friend’s Wedding deserves more credit than it gets for playing with typical sympathies of the genre. Here, it’s an unusually icy Julia Roberts who’s the marauding ex on the guest list, and not everything goes her way. In & Out (1997) stars Kevin Kline as a groom who spoils his own party by coming out as gay – then a pretty fresh twist on proceedings, though the heart of Frank Oz’s film seemed to be with Joan Cusack’s spurned bride, collapsed on the roadside in her whipped-cream gown.
More children’s films than you might think climax on the stop the wedding trope too. It’s a matter of life and death for mute, sidelined Ariel in Disney’s original animated version of The Little Mermaid, though she gets her man in the end – unlike in Hans Christian Andersen’s crueller story. Shrek likewise culminates in the simultaneous breaking of an engagement and a curse. In The Princess Bride, Robin Wright’s eponymous heroine spends practically the whole film foiling unwanted wedding plans. In the cheerfully manic, rather underrated Muppets Most Wanted, an impostor complicates poor Miss Piggy’s long-held dream to finally make an honest frog of Kermit.
At least none of these weddings turn out as bloodily violent as the vengeful bride’s special day in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 1, or, indeed, the planned marriage of monsters in the 1930s horror classic TheBride of Frankenstein, brutally terminated by the groom in the throes of heartbreak. In two very adult variations on the theme, the wedding goes ahead, but futilely so. The polygamous businessman of Ousmane Sembène’s caustically brilliant satire Xala (Internet Archive) is struck by erectile dysfunction before he can consummate his third marriage, and while the wedding ceremony in Lars von Trier’s shattering Melancholia narrowly survives the vagaries of depression and mental health, it can’t endure an imminent apocalypse. By contrast, the runaway lovers of The Graduate, uncertainly fleeing a crashed wedding on a bus to anywhere, have less to worry about.
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