Miljenko, the owner of the Zagreb chain store Cromax, is shocked when his daughter Ana, working in London, phones him on his birthday and reveals she is pregnant with Nebojša, a Serb. Nebojša's dad, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Serbia, Vuk, is also shocked to find out his soon to be daughter-in-law is a Croat. However, since Miljenko is in debt, and he could clear it by expanding to Serbia's market, whereas Vuk wants to finance a Belgrade metro, but its EU funds are frozen due to a veto of a Croatian politician, the two men decide to accept the wedding between Ana and Nebojša to mutually settle their business problems. The wedding is planned in Crikvenica, but a lot of problems arise, including if it should be a Catholic or an Orthodox wedding. Nebojša and Ana wed outside of this chaos on a boat by a skipper. Ana gives birth and the families reconcile.
Croat-Serb relations often make for good movie topics, and Igor Seregi's "The Wedding", which thematizes a wedding between two Croat-Serb families, surprisingly became the highest-grossing Croatian film up until that time, with over 400,000 tickets sold at the local box office. The first 20 minutes of "The Wedding" are good because they deliciously set up the quirky concept, and several jokes are good there (for instance, Nebojsa having a video call with his parents to tell them about his pregnant girlfriend, telling vaguely that she is "from our areas"; when Miljenko says that there will be no official photograph of the wedding, which will be handled by grandma, who adds: "I will only photograph our side of family!"). But after that (starting from around the entrance of the rapper), the film slowly fades away, and the remainder is just a routine empty walk on auto-pilot. The actors are enthusiastically speaking out their mediocre lines, but at the end of the day, they are still just mediocre lines. The film is a blend of a soap opera and a sitcom, without a more versatile creative latitude. It's as if they just wrote some good jokes at the start, and then just gave up and delivered a standard, thin storyline without inspiration. The lazy finale seems to have been just added to finish the film, not to reach some climax of humor or offer some good bits. A small highlight is Serbian actress Andelka Stevic Zugic as Dragana, who has some comic authority ("We need to get a horse." - "A horse?" - "Am I in a cave with an echo, or why are my words constantly being repeated back to me?"), and she is much more interesting than the rest of the characters. Surprisingly, the wedding couple is highly marginalized and we do not find out much about them. It is a solid film, but overall, they could have made a much more imaginative story from this concept, since its potentials were left unused.
Grade:+
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