The Best Man's Wedding

Roro works in park maintenance in Sweden. He is the son of a Lebanese family and has a girlfriend called Lisa. He has not told his family. They have already found him a wife; a girl called Yasmin, whose family says she has to marry to stay in Sweden. Roro cannot refuse. Yasmin does not want the marriage either and the two make an arrangement: they will act as if engaged and buy time. Meanwhile his workmate Måns has a problem of his own and is embarrassed to speak of it. The two men's lies grow at the same time. Josef Fares writes and directs; it is his first feature. Fares Fares, Torkel Petersson and Tuva Novotny are in the cast. It is a Swedish production. The director and the lead actor are brothers; the family emigrated from Lebanon to Sweden. The film was a very large success at the Swedish box office and among the most watched domestic productions of its time. The matter it treats is being caught between two cultures; the film builds it as a comic situation rather than a crisis of identity. The cast comes largely from the director's circle and some are not professional actors. The narrative does not show the immigrant family as one dimensional; the father has a logic of his own. Its limit is structure; the second strand leans on crude humour and stays detached from the main story. Another limit is the women; the narrative does not make enough room for them. Who it is for: viewers who like Swedish comedy and stories of immigrant families. Who it is not for: the humour is crude, the side strand unnecessary, and the resolution easy.