Last Wedding proves love is a strange thing

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This article was published 19/11/2001 (8964 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

TORONTO — Love is a strange, strange thing and Vancouver filmmaker Bruce Sweeney makes no attempt to sugarcoat the subject.

His latest film, Last Wedding, tells it like it is, putting love — in all its hilariously painful, psychotic and frustrating splendour — on full display.

The dark comedy about disintegrating relationships recently held the distinction of being the first western Canadian film to open the Toronto International Film Festival. It premiered there to glowing reviews — critics have lauded it for helping pulverize the notion that Canadian films are inaccessible to mainstream audiences — and today, it opens across Canada.

Last Wedding details the troubled, fraying relationships of three pairs of thirtysomething Vancouverites. Waterproofing expert Noah (Benajmin Ratner) and his aspiring, albeit talentless, country rock singing fiance Zipporah (Frida Betrani) are eager to get married just six months after meeting, much to the dismay of family and friends. Then there are Noah’s best friends: Peter (Tom Scholte), a CanLit professor whose long-term relationship with librarian girlfriend Leslie (Nancy Sivak) has become stagnant; and Shane (Vincent Gale), a disenchanted architect who is threatened by his newly graduated girlfriend’s (Molly Parker) success in the same field.

“I think it’s somewhat about male weakness,” says Sweeney. “Which is something that I know all about. I wanted this film to be driven by behavioural truths. I wanted to take all those troubling bits of behaviour and put them on screen.”

Though he’s now happily married (“My wife loves it,” he says of the film. “She shares my cynical vision”), Sweeney says he drew upon his own past relationships when writing the script.

“I don’t think it’s about anyone specifically,” he says. “But I drew upon my influences and the actors drew upon their past experiences and we built a story and a narrative together that makes sense.”

Like British filmmaker Mike Leigh (and Winnipeg filmmaker Sean Garrity, who picked up an award at the Toronto fest for his feature, Inertia), Sweeney is known for his unique, improv-based approach to filmmaking. He wrote a script for Last Wedding prior to casting the film, but went on to conduct extensive workshops and improv sessions with his actors — all of whom (except Parker) had worked with him on Live Bait and Dirty, his previous features — and thus tweaked the script according to his actors’ input.

“All good actors make their character tick and all the actors here did a lot of homework to make the characters their own,” Sweeney says.

“Bruce knows us pretty well and he knows how to push our buttons,” says Scholte. “One of the things I like about him is that he refuses to sentimentalize our characters at any moment. It’s great to have total room to play and at the same time, absolutely trust in your director. All of us believe that Bruce is never going to let us have a really false moment out there. So we’ve got that trust, and that’s when being an actor is the best.”

Scholte says he believes there are too many oversimplified, black-and-white renditions of people — and their relationships — presented on the big screen; movies like Last Wedding, he believes, fill both a void and a need.

dinah.clarkson@freepress.mb.ca