nunta muta / silent wedding

saturday, september 5

the romanian film Nunta Muta/silent wedding

a wedding in a remote village .. all the guests are gathered .. the food prepared .. the wine ..

 

but Stallin has just died, and the Russian commandant imposes a mourning period, and orders the wedding party to be called off .. or those who celebrate will be charged with treason .. so the villagers decide to celebrate in complete silence, lest they get caught ..

yes, there is the usual bunch of stock characters playing out a cartoon story line .. with lots of slapstick ... but against the backdrop of the absurdities and dispassionate violence of the russian occupation, it may be one of the few ways to  show it ..

in certain respects it reminded me of some of the yugoslavian (serb, croation, you name it) films i've seen over the years ..

the scene of the silent wedding itself, with its extended mime comedies .. could be a classic of the genre (especially were some of the "jokes" not quite as lengthy: we do get it!) .. but, then, some people are dense ..

case in point: broken telephone: the groom proposes a toast. as no one can read his lips, he whispers it to the guest next to him .. the toast passes from mouth to ear till the mute man hears it and is only able to mumble something unintelligible to the next person .. we then see the subtitles for how the toast gets mangled from person to person, getting raunchier and raunchier .. till, somehow, when it gets back to the bride, is wedding quality again .. as much of this relies on mis-hearings, the subtitler did an admirable job in conveying all this in English ..

so i forgive the film maker, Horatiu Malaele ..

 

cinemoo in montreal