Drazen Kuljanin's film, How to Stop a Wedding, is a fine noble first feature. The vision is clear, if not fully executed. Typical of green directors, the film drips with energetic, anxious talent but toes the line between portraying the youthful, emotional exuberance that such a story-line naturally possesses and retracting the characters into a slow, muddy sinkhole.
The song scene provides an exciting and original break from the physical perspective of the others, yet it is out of touch with the rest of the movie. The interruption in cinematographic flow is surely fun to any viewer, but it lacks the emotional honesty of other wrought and more complex moments between Amanda and Philip.
The overarching tension is tentatively resolved with a truly beautiful ending that leaves the audience sharing Amanda's heaving lungs and interrupted inhalation pattern. Yet within a few days' time, one revisits the film hoping for more—something less burdened by a soft, flailing lack of resolution that gives way to external influence—something rawer, purer, and more succinctly forceful. Whether Drazen's next film will resolve this juvenile and misguided ambivalence is to be determined.
The song scene provides an exciting and original break from the physical perspective of the others, yet it is out of touch with the rest of the movie. The interruption in cinematographic flow is surely fun to any viewer, but it lacks the emotional honesty of other wrought and more complex moments between Amanda and Philip.
The overarching tension is tentatively resolved with a truly beautiful ending that leaves the audience sharing Amanda's heaving lungs and interrupted inhalation pattern. Yet within a few days' time, one revisits the film hoping for more—something less burdened by a soft, flailing lack of resolution that gives way to external influence—something rawer, purer, and more succinctly forceful. Whether Drazen's next film will resolve this juvenile and misguided ambivalence is to be determined.
