The French title of Serial (Bad) Weddings is a grumble flung at heaven. Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu ? — Good God, what have we done? The one asking is a father-in-law whose four daughters have all married out, and not one of them married a native-born Frenchman. The Chinese title plays it straight: Being the In-Laws Is Really Hard. Between them, the two titles set the tone for the whole film — a pair of parents airing their grievances. Except the grievance found an echo. Twelve million French people bought tickets to listen.
I went through the film’s box-office figures and reviews from both sides of the world. The setup can be stated in one sentence. Claude Verneuil is a notary in a provincial town, comfortably off, a self-professed Gaullist, a Catholic, and his wife Marie is the same. In the film’s first ten minutes, the three older daughters marry out one after another, to an Algerian Muslim lawyer, a Jewish businessman, and a Chinese banker, respectively. Claude’s face darkens one shade more at every wedding. The old couple swallow it and put all their hope in the youngest daughter, praying that she will at least marry a French Catholic. In the end, she brings home an actor from Côte d’Ivoire. Claude is played by Christian Clavier, Marie by Chantal Lauby, two veteran faces of French comedy holding this family’s dinner table together.
The funniest thing about the film is that it never bothers to hide this father-in-law’s pettiness. When he is down, he shuts himself in his study and plays the old song Douce France, listening for the France he carries in his heart. His wife Marie has a much better attitude. She puts real thought into the family dinners, a halal main dish for the Muslim in-laws, a kosher one for the Jewish in-laws, and a Chinese spread for the Chinese son-in-law’s family. But no matter how thoughtful the mother-in-law is, she cannot stop the sons-in-law from going at each other the moment they sit down at the same table.
Put the three sons-in-law together and they greet each other with stereotypes. The Arab son-in-law calls the Jewish one stingy, the Jewish one cracks that the Chinese one will eat anything, and the Chinese one shoots back that the Arab one is a male chauvinist. A full circle, and nobody gets away. This is the boldest part of the film. Every ethnicity at the table gets roasted, including the French father-in-law who thinks of himself as the most normal one there. He gets roasted the hardest.
Claude has a worthy opponent. The father of the youngest daughter’s boyfriend is a retired Ivorian soldier, and this African father-in-law hates the idea of his son marrying a white woman even more than Claude does. The two men glare at each other, one defending the dignity of old Europe, the other the dignity of old Africa. The film frames prejudice as a two-way street, and that is a step further than many comedies of its kind dare to go. Intolerance belongs to both sides.
The strange thing about this family is that the more they fight, the more they feel like family. At the circumcision banquet they nearly flip the table. A few rounds later someone strikes up La Marseillaise, each man trying to prove he is more French than the rest. Strangers quarrel once and drift apart. Family quarrels, then sits back down and keeps on eating.
The market response was bigger than anyone imagined. Released on April 16, 2014, the film topped France’s weekly box office in its second week, beating Rio 2 with a running total of 3.415 million admissions. By the end of its run, sources differ slightly on the final count, 12.23 million on one side, 12.35 million on the other, but either way it was the biggest film in France in 2014. Douban holds it at 8.0, no small score for a pure comedy. Its worldwide gross was $176 million, with France alone accounting for over $104 million.
There is another detail on the box-office page. The contributing countries are listed one by one. Germany, $35 million. Spain, $10 million. Even South Korea, over $1.2 million. North America appears nowhere. The film never made it into American theaters.
Why did America pass? When the sequel came out, French outlet The Local asked exactly that. Their answer, roughly, is that the French comic tradition is built on mocking other people. Solemn things and taboo things all become material, and nothing is filtered on the way out. American distributors feared controversy. The stereotypes the film trades in are precisely the ones Hollywood comedy has spent the past two decades steering around. Cross the Pyrenees, though, and the same jokes worked again. In Spain the film’s title was translated almost literally, Good Lord, what have we done to you, and it took in over $10 million there, earning a Best European Film nomination at that year’s Goya Awards and losing to Ida.
There is one date that no one writing about this film can avoid. It came out in April 2014. On January 7, 2015, the Charlie Hebdo attack happened in Paris. Nine months apart. The film ends with a big wedding, the whole family squeezed into a single group photo. Nine months later, the real France was nowhere near as easy to reconcile as the Verneuils’ dinner table. One Chinese critic wrote that this kind of round-table harmony holds only in movies, otherwise there would have been no Charlie Hebdo tragedy. That is a heavy thing to say, and I agree with most of it. The film never answers whether France’s multicultural experiment works. All it does is take a question no one wants to put on the table and speak it out loud, in the middle of the laughter.
The family’s story went on for two more films. In the 2019 sequel, the crisis flips direction. The four sons-in-law have had enough of life in France and want to leave, and the father-in-law who once refused to accept them now fights to keep them. It drew 2.15 million admissions in its first week and 6 million within a month. The heat had not cooled. In the 2022 third film, all the in-law parents crowd into the frame. Admissions topped 2 million, clearly fewer than before. Across the trilogy, the films drew over 21 million admissions in France. The same recipe does go stale by the third helping, and audiences know it. You can guess the ending ten minutes in. Still, from 2014 to 2022 this family happened to walk alongside Europe through its most unsettled eight years, from terror attacks to the refugee crisis to the arguments over identity politics, missing none of it. The recipe stayed the same. The world outside it turned over.
Claude has moments when he cannot take it anymore. He goes out to the yard and chops wood to blow off steam. A notary can only chop his own firewood. This film solves nothing, and it never intended to. What it manages is to get a table full of people who cannot stand each other to finish the meal, and come back for the next quarrel. Not many films can pull that off. Not many societies can either.