OVERVIEW
On March 11, 1978, the seven Puig siblings gather near Nantes for the wedding of the youngest, Jacques (Paul Kircher), to Martine (Malou Khebizi), while their estranged father remains conspicuously absent. As the family drinks, dances, flirts, and argues, the film slowly pieces together the history and old wounds that shaped them before jumping beyond the celebration to reveal glimpses of their future, gradually exposing the pain and tragedy surrounding this seemingly joyful occasion.
BACKGROUND
The film is based on Honoré’s own play Le Ciel de Nantes, created in Lyon in November 2021, which was itself inspired by his childhood experiences at his uncle’s wedding. Among the things that carried over from that event are the songs, the fact that the wedding took place on the day of singer Claude François’s death, and, lastly, the wedding serving the artificial orange-flavored soft drink Tang, which ultimately inspired the film’s title. It was originally conceived as a story spanning several decades before being trimmed to a single day, aside from flashes of the future, and marks Honoré’s seventh appearance at the Cannes Film Festival.
THE REVIEW
The greatest pleasure of the film is that it invites you to be part of the celebration, like a new family member being introduced to each person and their story. We are dropped directly into their lives, with decades of resentments and old wounds and very little exposition, while Jeanne Lapoirie captures the whole event on 35mm as if the memories were being recorded up close, giving the sense that what we are experiencing is a time capsule. We also get a great glimpse of the culture behind these weddings, from the arrivals to the nap each guest takes so they can return to the party later, to the music and the dances.
We soon begin to understand who each family member is and how they fit within the larger family dynamic. Much of the early attention goes to Adèle Exarchopoulos’s fragile Claudie, who cannot accept that her husband has left her and is already moving on with someone else. Vincent Lacoste’s Dominique is the loud, larger-than-life sibling quietly hiding his unemployment and asking for money on the side, while Alban Lenoir’s Roger lets his racism slip. The youngest of the seven is Paul Kircher’s Jacques, the groom, whose own wedding cannot quite escape his resentment toward their absent father.
That absence casts a shadow over the whole celebration. People tiptoe around the subject, and whenever he is mentioned, someone is afraid they said too much. He also gives the family a common reason to stay close, as if their shared enemy had made them a unit, and now that he is gone and not invited, that reason is disappearing with him. He shows up later anyway, watching the party and wanting back in, which leads to the confrontation where the family is the most united it ever gets in the film.
Those dynamics, like the eye-rolling that greets Claudie’s ramblings about her old husband, make them feel like real people, and the film still keeps it tight and propulsive. Other than Claudie, we do not dig too deep into the other members, but we get enough. There is also a lot of humor and secondhand embarrassment. Everything feels extremely natural, which is a credit to Honoré’s remarkably controlled filmmaking.
FINAL THOUGHTS
What Honoré achieves in Orange-Flavoured Wedding is deceptively difficult, with many characters, side plots, and family history to cover, all captured over the course of a single day in their lives. In condensing his original decades-spanning script into a feature, he retained all that content, and the result is far more interesting, since an event like this is enough for us to understand who these people are and where their lives are headed. We might not need to see it, and my minor qualm with the film is its unnecessary flash-forwards. We already know where those lives are going, and that, like every family reunion, this one will grow smaller and smaller with time, until all that remains is the nostalgia of those young enough to remember it, looking back with the bitterness, and the awful taste, of a glass of Tang.