marsanobill Review of The Wedding Plan

The Wedding Plan (2016)

Yeastily Ethnic But Incredible and Unpalatable

[3/10 · 28 May 2017]

More garden-variety 'critics rave' rubbish, utterly incredible but full of yeasty ethnicity. Dumped by her fiancé just before the wedding, Michal—-desperate, delusory, needy and pathetic-—proceeds nevertheless, insisting that God Will Provide a groom. Did I mention that she's 32 and feels humiliated by her singleness? She even has the chutzpah to put our Lord on a short leash: He must provide no later than the last night of Hanukkah, 20 days away!, because she's already hired the hall. But even the Lord's choices are limited here. Michal is not only orthodox but WAY orthodox, and on top of that wants True Love. Perhaps because 'God helps those who help themselves,' she adds a second string to her bow, a matchmaker-cum- mystic who smears her face with fish guts and says all will be well. Reassured, Michael proceeds to sampling the dinner menu, inviting 200 guests, buying a gown. Intermittently, perhaps because Yahweh is working to rule, she interviews prospective grooms on her own. Now all this is possibly the makings of comedy, particularly of the madcap or screwball kind, but writer-director Rama Burshtein is mostly invested in sadcap and rueball. Laughs are few and mostly polite, the dialogue painful. Interviews with potential grooms are tense with slit-eyed suspicion--not communicative but insinuative, like encounters with the Stasi just before they get out the rubber hoses. Possibly seeking to avoid the crushing dreariness of her 2012 'Fill the Void,' or more likely to pad her sagging story, Burshtein cheats by twice introducing the same red herring. Finally she moves to a slam-bang ending that is both unconvincing to the critical and unsatisfying to the gullible. There's an unattractive hollowness to the story: marriage among Michal's sect (which another IMDb-er informs me is the Haredi (thanks!) is presented as if it were little more than a business transaction, a deal made solely with procreation in mind. Indeed at the 59th minute of the 11th hour, Michal's reliance on the Almighty has fallen so far that she offers to marry a man she's rejected before, an it can't happen only because he's on army duty and can't do the deal that very night. All of this is done over the phone. And yet we're supposed to believe that she wants True Love?