Four Weddings and a Funeral

[TheBlueRobin]

Watched this film tonight, bit of a comfort film and love anything from Richard Curtis. What I hadn't really paid attention to before was how soon people got married? Lydia and Bernard after 3 months. Carrie and Hamish after a few months?

Was this more normal in the 90s or just a plot device? I'm getting married this year but was born in the 90s and been with my partner for nearly 8 years. Most of my cousins got married in the 90s in their early twenties after 1-2 years together.

Yabu - that was normal in the 90s
Yanbu - definitely unusual, people took longer to get married.

I tried watching it recently, I think when it was on over Christmas. I lasted less than twenty minutes. It was an absolute mess.

But living together in the nineties was entirely ordinary!

The speedy weddings in FWAAF are, as many pps have said, purely a plot device to structure the film.

I mean, if we took Richard Curtis films as documentaries, it would be an odd old world.

Brits form a single, tight network of friends, vaguely Oxbridgy and satirical in tone, but always with one slightly kooky-looking woman who doesn't seem to come from the same world as the rest, one representative from Scotland or Wales, and with one gay or disabled person for variety.

Airports have minimal security. The PM wanders around the East End with one security guy chosen for his singing voice.

Americans are always thin, glamorous and sexually upfront. Brits are always bumbling and incapable of Using Their Words. London property prices are no reason why someone of modest means should not buy a large house in Notting Hill and run a failing bookshop.

Try watching Yesterday if you want complete fiction. I know that is Danny Boyle , but it reminded me of a Curtis film ( he may have been involved in too? Not sure really )
It makes four weddings seem real! Lol

Maybe it's the demographic, I think it was more likely if upper class, upper middle class. I was a young teenager when the film came out but if you contrast that with British sitcoms like Men Behaving Badly, people just loved together or shows like the Word (which I shouldn't have really been watching) it was this ladette culture brewing so definitely not marriage.

I think Charles and Duckface's wedding is about a year after Gareth's funeral/Carrie's wedding. Duckface is (again inexplicably!) invited to Carrie's wedding and has a boyfriend there.

You called? 😂😂😂

I assumed that Lydia was already pregnant when she married Bernard? I can't remember the dates though. I really enjoy rewatching it.

This is from IMDB:

Based on the wedding invitations the timeline is as follows: in May, wedding number one (Angus and Laura), in August, wedding number two (Bernard and Lydia), in October, wedding number three (Carrie and Hamish) and Gareth's funeral, and in August, wedding number four (Charlie and Henrietta).

Are you thinking of Angus and Laura, who have twin girls? Bernard and Lydia don't have children during the film's time period.

Ahhh I must have got them confused with Angus and Laura then.

Well it's meant to be complete fiction. Not sure what your point is. We're you watching the film saying to yourself "well that would never happen in real life"?

Was just making the point that Yesterday is even more ridiculous and far fetched , just musings about films really. I take your point though.

My friends and I were in our 20s in the 90s and some got married fairly quickly. They tended to be ambitious well organized people with big plans and felt that they were “starting life” together and that it was both romantic and efficient to just be properly married and get on with it. They had well off parents who paid; they probably had lives together but would secretly have been uncomfortable doing so without being engaged, their parents definitely. The engagement or proposal wasn’t a thing. Someone would suggest getting married, possibly drunkenly, the other would agree, and that would be that. The weddings were comfortable, well catered and didn’t have stupid touches like animals doing things or weird photography of inanimate objects. The bride got dressed at home and maybe got a hairdresser round for her and her mum and the bridesmaids, but no photographers or special accessories.

at the same time, other couples were living together and one half assumed / hoped that meant theyd get married, the other had no intention of marrying that person. About 10 years later a huge number of those “starter relationships” all fell apart at around the same time, creating a new musical chairs scramble

While it is weird and inexplicable in 4 weddings that everyone is at Carrie and angus’ wedding, on the other hand I do remember that as a time when friendship groups were very fluid and fast moving. You could suddenly be deeply involved with people a friend had introduced you to in the pub the week before

I thought Love Actually was total crap when it came out. It feels like a film made up of rejected jokes from other RC films, and hasn't aged especially well. It has become a bit of a nostalgia watch though.

I totally agree. I think a lot of people are remembering it with rose tinted glasses and the fact that it's usually shown around Christmas when you can get away with all sorts of shite

Don’t know about it being “normal”, but it did depend on your social circle. I met ex husband in Feb ‘96 and married in July ‘96 (very small wedding! we split up after 20 years 😝). The reasoning behind that is he was in the army and we could only get housing after marriage! It was considered quite unusual
I was a nanny in ‘94 when the film came out. My boss was very upper class, loved the film because it was exactly like the weddings they went to! Among her circle -who all knew each other/knew them from boarding school etc, living together was still slightly “off’, and certainly not mentioned in front of Grandma!. (remember it was only 14 years earlier that Prince Charles HAD to marry a virgin, and it was noted and frowned upon that Fergie had lived with a previous boyfriend prior to marrying Andy!) Most engagements and weddings were fairly formulaic and iirc were mostly in the summer, and timed to avoid Royal Ascot, Wimbledon, and Henley Royal Regatta!
I loved the soundtrack and cried at the funeral 😢

The original script, which is quite different in lots of ways from the finished film (including some really weird bits, like Tom paying for Charles to fly to his own wedding to Henrietta in a helicopter so as not to be late!), is available online.

Carrie is much brasher and sexier in it -- when the vicar at the first wedding asks if anyone has any objections to the marriage, she says to her neighbour 'I suppose him [Angus] being a terrible lay doesn't count?' and after the service, she takes off her hat and tights and dumps them in a nearby bin before going to the reception, and spends the entire first wedding being chatted up by other men.

When she sleeps with Charles the second time, after she's engaged, she says upfront 'The second I said yes to Hamish I knew there'd be one final fling', and she throws him out at 5 am because Hamish's sister is coming over to talk about bridesmaids. When she takes Charles wedding dress shopping with her, one outfit she tries on is hotpants, and at one point she runs out of the fitting room in her bra and pants and says 'What about the beach look?' AND she says Hamish (who is much nicer in the script, and whose wedding speech is quite funny and likeable) says he's slept with 84 women.

Carrie also begins her own wedding speech by saying the last time she gave an important speech she was explaining her her parents why she had condoms in her bedside table.

And in the script she doesn't say 'Is it still raining? I hadn't noticed'!

Citizen Kane is a work of real brilliance, and does have its own brand of humour albeit dark. William Randolph Hearst was a true horror whose actions have quite literally destroyed people. He thoroughly deserved to be sent up in the most visceral way possible! You can't in all seriousness put Mankiewicz/Welles and Richard Curtis in the same sentence.

Four Weddings was pretty much rescued by Kristin Scott Thomas and the late and sadly underrated Charlotte Coleman. Rowan Atkinson was too hammed up and overplayed to the point of cringeiness. Thomas afforded a much-needed note of pathos amongst all the saccharine, and Coleman was just about the only remotely likeable character. Agree with the PPs above that Carrie was awful.

Notting Hill was more than enough to convince me that I never wanted to watch another Richard Curtis film in my life.

@trockodile I'm sure I read somewhere that when Queen Camilla and Andrew Parker-Bowles were dating, her father was so livid that APB hadn't yet proposed, despite them practically living together, that he put an engagement announcement in the Times and they basically had to go through with it to save face....

i read the great WH Auden poem which appeared in 4WAAF at my dear darling late husband’s funeral. I was pretty much in a haze of shock throughout the whole service but there were so many loud outpourings of grief, it was quite surreal. He was young and it was very very unexpected. And 4WAAF was not only one of his favourite films, but one of our favourite regulars when we were having a snuggly night in. It felt very fitting.

I agree. I was completely underwhelmed by Notting Hill. I'd had enough of "let's stick a beautiful famous American actress in it for Hugh Grant to swoon over, we don't need to worry about the rest". Four Weddings i thought was ok

I was disappointed by Notting Hill too. Plot holes aside (poor Angus not even invited to the stag do, when Charles was his best man), I think FWAAF really holds up. I think the humour is on point, and it's so evocative of those summers in your late 20s when it feels like you have a wedding every weekend.

I had hoped Notting Hill was a literally sequel to Four Weddings, so was disappointed straight off the bat (no Google ahead of time in those days).

I have a soft spot for Love Actually though. Yes, I've read and agree with the Jezabel article, and yes, it's emotionally manipulative - but it really does have its funny moments too. More character-driven than one liners. Yes, when I watched it with DD I did have to keep pausing it to reiterate that Natalie Is Not Fat. But I will never not chortle at "Where the fuck is my fucking coat". Plus Emma Thompson is sublime.

Most RC films were made for the American audience. Get them on board with a few quirky Americans and sell it on to them. I didn’t mind Notting Hill, I often wondered how she found out his landline number , but guessed it was ‘her people’ who did the digging there with the phone book if he was in it. Ringing the actual book shop may have been a bit more believable!
I liked his friends who seemed a lot more well rounded than the four weddings ones were especially the one who didn’t recognize Anna Scott at first.

Julia Roberts' character being called Anna Scott really irritates me. Why did they give her such a boring, British name?