Four Weddings and a Funeral

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) consists of five separate days: four weddings and a funeral. Charles keeps going to other people's weddings with a group of friends and never marries. At the first he meets an American woman named Carrie. They meet again at the later ones and the timing is wrong every time. The structure runs on that repetition. The months in between are never shown; there are only those five days, and we work out what changed from the state people are in. The opening scene is almost entirely the repetition of one swear word and sets the tone within thirty seconds. Richard Curtis wrote it out of his own life; he had been to a great many weddings in his twenties and had no story of his own at any of them. It was shot in six weeks on a budget under three million pounds. It passed two hundred and forty five million dollars worldwide and became the highest grossing British film to that point. The poem read at the funeral is by W. H. Auden. It had appeared in a play in 1936 and was little known. When the film opened, Faber and Faber published a slim collection of ten poems including it, and that book sold around a quarter of a million copies. A romantic comedy put a poet back into circulation. Hugh Grant's career was built on this film. It runs 117 minutes. Good for: British comedy, romantic comedy, and the nineties. Less good for: the humour is very British and the ending is arguably too easy.