A Wedding (1978)

Robert Altman is one of those directors I have an ambivalent relationship to. Some of his films are splendid, others not. I love the weird, mysterious 3 women and I have perhaps never seen a worse movie than Dr. T and the women. A Wedding is a goofy film about, well, the fucked-up state of humankind. It's almost a farce. But that is not a negative judgement. This film bustles with people and when I saw the opening credits I was quite impressed by the list of actors included. The film opens on a grand note with a fancy church ceremony and pompous church music. From there, everything tends to deteriorate. The film consists of buzzing conversations, some of them overlapping, creating one hell of a crowded soundscape. This is 2 hours of endless human cackling: "culture clashes", gossip, bullship, plain weirdness, revelations, indecencies, backstabbing, slander. Altman provides us with a list of the different ways in which we use language to fuck up life for ourselves and for others. The funniest scenes involve the person responsible for the ceremonies of the wedding reception. She gives instructions as she were an anthropologist visting another planet, trying to clarify to an alien species the secret rites of humanity.