Avis des critiques

The film is elevated by a willingness to take risks with tone and form, be it a late-in-the-game castration or a climax featuring a blatantly fake-looking swarm of computer-generated bees. Shunning the need to reconfigure the melodrama into a more festival-friendly, staid, or academic experience, Nasrallah's rollicking comedy is a timely reminder of what "popular cinema" used to mean, and still does for an internationally under-represented industry.

Nasrallah's film was a disappointingly pedestrian family free-for-all around a wedding table that for all intents and purposes came across as a made-for-TV attempt at commedia all'italiana.

There's no shortage of winningly bright colors, delicious dishes, and pumping music, but Nasrallah seems a bit overwhelmed when it comes to making all the film's many moving parts work as one, with the constant stream of characters and odd shifts in tone frequently creating confusing, even incoherent moments.

Resorting to the archetypical tropes of popular cinema doesn't stop the filmmaker from working on psychological nuances, though maybe the conclusion suffers from some occasional, formulaic faux pas. That said, Nasrallah stages a sensorial feast of chromatic vitality, sexual overflow and unforgiving social criticism nestled in a solid, consequential narrative that is very hard to come by at film festivals.