White Wedding (1989)

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Blistering performances.

This is a very deep and moving film.I saw it over 10 years ago for the first time and was fascinated, and I still am.The story is well constructed and follows the human rhythms, nothing is calculated or forced, but all is just terribly... real. It's an incredible story of love, loyalty, violence, integrity, doubts, with two protagonists at the limits of their lives. All characters are played by good actors, but the young girl and the professor (Vanessa and Bruno) stand out... what a performance! For me this is a masterpiece.

Bruno Cremer is a fiftyish philosophy teacher who tries to help his seventeen-year-old student, Vanessa Paradis, get her academic efforts in order. She shows up late for class, if at all, she's flunking math and other subjects. He gives a lecture on Freud and the unconscious and asks her to stay after class and explain why she's so slack. After all, maybe he can help her.The subject of his lecture, the unconscious, was apt because Bruno's ego has no idea of what his id is leading him into. One wonders if he is familiar with the Electra complex. Paradis invites him to her flat where she casually undresses and changes clothes in front of him, to his embarrassment. I mean -- even in Loire there are limits.Before you know it -- or before Cremer knows it, at any rate -- they're lovers. Hints of the affair become received wisdom although both desperately try to hide their love for one another. Certainly, Cremer's wife knows about it. As usual, both females can waltz intuitive rings around the somewhat oafish male.Cremer's wife is fed up with the constant phone calls and the poison pen letter and finally leaves him for a while, telling him to think it over before she returns. He thinks it over between roles in the hay with Paradis and decides it wouldn't work between the professor and the student. Sensibly, he ends it, telling Paradis that in ten years he'll be an old man. Her passion, though, seems adamantine. She'll love him whether he's young or old, thin or fat, sick or healthy. They can run away together and she can pretend to be his DAUGHTER. And she seems to mean it, but Cremer is mature (or dull) enough to see that not all things are possible. So back comes the jealous wife.It doesn't work out. Paradis continues to haunt him and taunt him. She nuzzles up to one new boyfriend after another in front of him. Her accomplices break the windows and paint filthy sayings on the bookstore his wife runs.At his wit's end, Cremer yanks her out of his classroom, flings her into an empty room and slaps her around, but she keeps coming back to him like a lost puppy until finally he gives in, peels off her clothes, and -- well, a few minutes later, the whole school seems to be peering through the windows at them, with one student yelling, "Hey, a teacher is screwing a naked girl!" What happens next to the undone Cremer is instructive. In America, if a teacher gets caught in flagrante delectable with an underage student, he (or she) winds up in court and then in jail. In France, Cremer is given a reprimand by his school and sent to exile in Dunkirk, where he continues lecturing as before. After all, screwing a naked seventeen-year-old girl on a classroom desk may not be evidence of savoir vivre but, well, why stir things up? (Insert here a philosophical shrug, the kind found in such abundance in France.) The performances are adequate, probably no more than that. Paradis is quite a lynx-eyed morseau with two shiny front teeth behind those tiny pouting lips. Seventeen? She's about as tall as Cremer's lower sternum. She's so petite and gracile, she looks as if she'd barely made fifteen, at least until she sheds her clothes, something that, to my perverted taste anyway, she doesn't do quite often enough. Her figure is exquisite.Bruno Cremer LOOKS like a philosophy professor, big, soft, flabby, and comfortable, with gentle blue eyes. His nose, though -- it looks as if, when God was handing out noses, he asked Cremer what he would like, and Cremer replied, "Two lumps, please." That proboscis has its identical twin on the face of George C. Scott.The script isn't bad actually. It deals intelligently with what is basically a conundrum without a solution. Paradis is right. They should take what they can get while it's available. But so is Cremer. Loving CAN be folly. Ten years, heck. In twenty he'll be 70 and she'll be a vibrant and eager 37. What's she going to do -- wheel him around in his lap robe to exciting night clubs? Jean-Claude Brisseau's direction is functional without being in any way imaginative. Cremer's switch from avuncular prof to jealous swain takes place too quickly. The outburst is unexpected. And Brisseau's got a shot -- and I swear I'm not making this up -- of the two lovers, one young, one old, running through a hillside field of canary yellow poesies beside a lake. All that's missing is slow motion. Otherwise it would be a parody of its genre. (Classy, adult, colorfully photographed soap opera.)

This film was outrageous, about a teacher acting on the advances of a minor. Even though the minor played by Vanessa Paradis who was 17 at the time of acting this part was sexually aggressive this does not excuse the teacher, a man in the position of power, from allowing himself to be drawn into her web. The minor was a little mentally unstable but very intelligent and unconventional to say the least. He should have offered her love and support but not sex. This is an interesting film, though, very watchable if totally unrealistic and amoral.

I saw this movie for the first time when I was 15 or so (1992) and ever since then I have seen it at least another 7 or 8 times. This is true, you know. School girls DO fall in love with exactly these kind of ppl. Not everyone falls for the latest boy-band-model-of-the-year type. Some goes for the sophisticated, sensitive, reliable and wise men. I got the movie from amazon as VHS, and still hope that one day it will come up as DVD title. Most recommended, for those who want to see true love in the eyes of young girls.