The 52: My Big Gay Italian Wedding

 From June 2023 to June 2024 I'll be watching a lgbtqia+ film each week and coming back here with my thoughts, feelings and plenty of hopes we aren't met with the "kill your gays" trope. I call this The 52.

Whew. To have 2 out of 4 of the films I’ve watched so far feature the cheating trope fills me with dread - perhaps exestentional, but I imagine it says far more about hollywood than anything else. Even the random, abrupt and fiercely out of place musical number didn’t win me over in the end. (Edit: apparently the film is based on an off-Broadway play, so the musical now makes ~more~ sense)

Image credit via official site.

My Big Gay Italian Wedding feels.... feels in retrospect as if it was trying to be Mamma Mia, a fun road trip film and, I guess, My Big Fat Greek Wedding? And I mean, it came the closest to being the latter, what with the title and all, but otherwise it fell flat.

This is a hard one to review, mostly because I feel overwhelmingly ambivalent about it. At times it was outlandishly funny - in that the comments some characters made were so out of pocket you just had to laugh - and at times it was just odd and uncomfortable with jokes about self harm and an obvious lack of understanding of the difference between someone who is transgender and someone who does/enjoys drag.

The story follows Antonio and his fiancee, Paulo, as they travel back to Antonio's small home town to announce their engagement. Within the first 5 minutes we see that Antonio is a man who wants marriage but is unable to tell his partner that he loves him, who preposes and instantly leaves for work, and who ultimately gets in a strop because he doesn’t want Paulo to come meet his family.

It’s a little weird.

It gets weirder.

Antonio has a stalker in his ex who, we discover, he secretly cheated on Paulo with; Antonio’s mother is in full support of the wedding as long as it is done specifically to her wishes and planned by her; and Antonio’s father is the open minded mayor who becomes so homophobic at learning of his son’s sexuality that he 1. is chucked out of the family home, 2. tries to get the wedding cancelled by devious means, 3. rants in church about how wrong homosexuality is, and 4. proooooobably tries to burn down the venue. We don’t get clarification on that one, but I mean, he was there. Stuck beneath Jesus, as it was (by which I mean he was literally stuck beneath a figure of Jesus as the church burned around him). But don’t worry because (spoiler) the next day he’s the wedding officiant.

You know, I feel like this could’ve been a good’un. I really do. Unfortunately, and you can quote me here: they can’t all be good’uns.

Like things shorter? Follow me on Letterboxd and see My Big Gay Italian Wedding review.