Serial (Bad) Weddings 2 (2019)

Serial (Bad) Weddings 2 returns us to the Verneuil household, where a Catholic bourgeois couple from the provinces presides over four daughters and their Jewish, Muslim, Chinese, and Black African husbands. The crisis this time is departure: the sons-in-law are contemplating lives elsewhere, and the film spends its running time negotiating whether the family can be reassembled under one roof. It is a sequel, commercially formidable, the highest-grossing French production of its year, and it knows its audience with the precision of a tax accountant.

The film's explicit subject is race and cultural difference, and it approaches that subject with the delicacy of a whoopee cushion. The keywords attached to it are marriage and racism, and the movie agrees with both. Every scene is organized around the friction of interfaith and interracial kinship, which places it high on the register of racial consciousness while keeping the messaging inside the bounds of broad farce. The sermon is present, but it arrives dressed as a punchline, so the lecturing stays moderate. The daughters themselves remain wives and plot devices, orbiting the patriarch, which leaves any feminist argument dormant. No LGBTQ characters appear. The ensemble is genuinely multi-ethnic and multi-faith, though the diversity functions as the comic premise, not as a casting declaration.

Elsewhere the film is a desert. Climate concerns do not intrude. The family is comfortably bourgeois and no critique of wealth disturbs the furniture. Bodies exist for slapstick. Neurodivergence goes unmentioned. History is left alone, the film being resolutely contemporary. What remains is a machine for chuckling at cultural difference, and it runs efficiently, if without grace.