Serial (Bad) Weddings (2014)

Philippe de Chauveron's 2014 comedy assembles a Catholic bourgeois household in Chinon and marries its four daughters into an Algerian Muslim, a Sephardi Jew, a Han Chinese atheist, and, to the parents' delayed horror, an Ivorian. The casting is doing visible work here. Four distinct communities are embodied on screen, and the film asks the audience to sit with the resulting dinner-table collisions for ninety minutes. Race and religion are not subtext. They are the text, discussed openly, acted upon, and used to structure nearly every scene.

The humor operates by handing ethnic clichés to every side in roughly equal measure. The Jew calls the Arab a name, the Arab returns fire, the Asian absorbs a karate chop. French audiences found this triumphant. English-language critics did not, and several accused the film of trading in the very racism it claims to mock. That is a fair argument to have. Less arguable is the picture's preoccupation with interracial marriage as a social fact, and its willingness to make the fathers' bigotry the engine of the plot.

Where the film lands is on a gentler note: two stubborn patriarchs discover a shared Gaullism and a shared fondness for fishing, and the wedding proceeds. The tolerance on offer is mild and arrives through farce, not sermon. Absent entirely are the other markers of contemporary social concern. The daughters exist to be married. No LGBTQ character appears. No environmental theme, no body image discourse, no neurodivergent representation, no critique of the notary and banker who populate the cast. A film can be about prejudice without being an instruction manual, and this one, for better and worse, is content to be a farce.