Love Wedding Repeat (2020)

Love Wedding Repeat arrives as a remake of the 2012 French farce Plan de Table, and it honors its source with some diligence: the same Roman wedding, the same misplaced sedative, the same narrator who freezes the frame and invites us to consider how many ways eight guests might arrange themselves at a table. Dean Craig, making his directorial debut, keeps the machinery turning. The result is a film that is largely apolitical, which in the current cultural weather is almost a novelty worth cataloguing.

The cast is agreeable and modestly multiethnic, with Freida Pinto, Olivia Munn, and Allan Mustafa in prominent roles, though the film treats this as a fact of the ensemble and nothing more. No line of dialogue invites us to dwell on it. Bryan, the male maid of honour, offers a gentle deviation from the expected, though the screenplay never develops his romantic life beyond a brief reunion with an ex. The women drive the day's chaos, and Hayley and Dina are granted a measure of interiority, yet the engine remains the traditional rom-com pursuit, with Sam Claflin running down a street after the girl.

There is no class critique here, no environmental concern, no engagement with race or body image, no neurodivergent reading of the sedative gags, which are simply gags. The film has no sermon to deliver and no history to revise. It wants only to be a light farce about seating charts, and it succeeds at being light. Critics were unkind to it. The film is not good, but it is innocent of the cultural preoccupations of its moment, and in this ledger that counts for something.