In the first installment of this series, I made the off-the-cuff, unresearched claim that the French films under consideration did not receive wide international release out of embarrassment. I was immediately called out for this, and, of course, it’s true that if a film can be marketed internationally, then it will be. The question to consider is why certain films that make bank domestically fall flat once they travel abroad—if they even make it that far.
Consider (again) the case of Intouchables, which somehow made boatloads of cash in France but not in the US, even in remake form. Or Dany Boon’s Welcome to the Sticks (2008), which is somehow the highest-grossing French film of all time (Dany Boon has been spared from this series; I have to draw the line somewhere). That movie generated Italian and Dutch remakes and was destined for an English remake with Will Smith in the starring role. I think it is safe to say that this will never, ever happen, though not for reasons related to the French film (which, to be absolutely clear, sucks).
Then we have our current subject, Serial (Bad) Weddings, the conspicuously (bad) title given to the French film Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu? (“What have we done to the Good Lord?” Or, perhaps: “What have we done to deserve this?”). That film was also a huge box office hit—number five on that IMBD list—but it didn’t receive much global distribution. The reason lies in the this behind “What did we do to deserve this?” And that this is the marriages contracted by the four daughters of Claude Verneuil (Christian Clavier, of the comedy troupe Le Splendid—“of the comedy troupe Le Splendid” will be a depressing refrain in this series), an haut bourgeois notary living in the city of Chinon in the Loire region.
In the opening of the first film, we are treated to montage of the first three (bad) weddings:
*Isabelle Suzanne Marie Verneuil (Frédérique Bel) marries Rachid Abdul Mohammed Ben Assem (Medi Sadoun), a French lawyer of Algerian origin.
*Odile Huguette Marie Verneuil (Julia Piaton in the first two; Alice David in the third) marries David Maurice Isaac Benichou (Ary Abittan), a French businessman of Israeli origin.
*Ségolène Chantal Marie Verneuil (Émilie Caen) marries Chao Pierre Paul Ling (Frédéric Chau), a French banker of Chinese origin.
This leaves youngest daughter Laure Evangeline Marie Verneuil (Élodie Fontan), who is engaged to a nice Catholic boy named Charles Koffi (Noom Diawara). Claude’s wife Marie (Chantal Lauby) exclaims the titular question when she learns that Charles is not French but from the Ivory Coast, which is as ivory as Greenland is green.
The basic problem with this scenario was succinctly summarized by fellow AE contributor Rioghnach Robinson, who told me, “I can’t believe someone took a ‘So, X, X, X, and X walk into a bar’ joke and made it into three screenplays.” Even more succinctly: The films are politically incorrect and borderline racist. Shout it from the rooftops: This is the film series that was too racist to be shown in American theatres. Excited yet? Let’s begin! (SPOILERS ahead!)
Serial (Bad) Weddings (Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu?, Philippe de Chauveron, 2014)
The first film begins with that questionable premise, but I haven’t yet touched on the plot, which is a different beast entirely. The main characters are not the daughters (practically interchangeable) or their husbands (definitely not interchangeable but broadly-drawn caricatures) but Claude and Marie, who are bigots—though maybe not incorrigible ones. The very worst moments happen right at the beginning, following the bris of David and Odile’s son Benjamin. After the event, with the family dining at Chao and Ségolène’s house, Claude openly states that he thinks circumcision is barbaric, and this sets off a splenetic chain reaction that ends when David attacks Chao with krav maga and is promptly karate chopped. For the sake of posterity, I have immortalized this moment in GIF format:
The coup de grâce, though, is when Claude and Marie return home, having been gifted with Benjamin’s foreskin. They attempt to bury it in their garden, but it is promptly eaten by Clovis the dog. The bad blood generated by this whole encounter guides the movie’s first half, until all parties make up over Christmas dinner. Then Laure’s new beau threatens to destabilize the family again.
I have to stop here to dwell on how backwards this is. Have you ever seen Fiddler on the Roof? Claude is a bit like Tevye the Dairyman, except he doesn’t have to fantasize about being rich because he already is. This Bizarro World Tevye would rather that his daughters marry a political revolutionary or a religious outsider rather than the poor little tailor boy. The skeleton key for the series might be Claude’s self-avowed Gaullist politics. I honestly don’t know what it means to be Gaullist in 2014, the year of this film’s release and a full 45 years after Charles de Gaulle definitively hung up his cap. The last time I think someone could call themselves Gaullist with a straight face would be 1967, which is also the year Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner came out. Claude seems to be perpetually stuck in that year. Maybe that’s when the script was first written?
There’s another side of the film that only begins to unravel after Christmas. Charles has his own terrible family—or terrible family member. His dad André (Pascal N’Zonzi) is an authoritarian prick with a deep voice, bulging eyes, and a devilish laugh. He is just as superficial as Claude and disapproves of Charles’ choice of career (he is an actor) and his choice of woman (“We know about Catherine Deneuve.”). His eventual trip to France and encounter with Claude is the dramatic climax of the film—and the denouement comes when they discover they are both rich assholes with questionable politics. They go fishing, get drunk, hit the town, and get thrown in the slammer for a night when they attempt to order a dessert whose name I am uncomfortable typing. The marriage proceeds. Dance party. The end. Or is it?
Most Questionable Moment: An embarras du choix! I think the dog eating the foreskin is the worst part. The rest is mostly a pileup of microaggressions. Marie visits a Chinese restaurant to order a chicken and is mistaken for the health inspector. Rachid shouts a takbir when he throws a snowball. David refers to his brothers-in-law as “Jackie Chan” and “Arafat” (Rachid is Algerian, but he will be treated as Palestinian when convenient). Stuff like that. Second place might be when the sons-in-law discreetly film Charles walking with his sister Viviane (who they do not realize is his sister) in order to sink Laure’s marriage. Truly, the members of this family deserve each other.
Serial (Bad) Weddings 2 (Qu’est-ce qu’on a ENCORE fait au Bon Dieu?, Philippe de Chauveron, 2019)
The natural cycle of rom-com sequels is to progress from marriage to babies. While Laure is pregnant at the beginning of Serial (Bad) Weddings 2 (and not pregnant at the end), it is a complete red herring. Her baby is a lure to bring the Koffi family back into France (and, hence, back into the plot) while setting up a wedding between Viviane (Tatiana Rojo) and her betrothed Nicole (Claudia Tagbo)—a wedding that can’t legally take place in the Ivory Coast.
Another feature of the comedy sequel (not just rom-coms) is the recycling of jokes and plotlines from the original, otherwise it has no business being a sequel. At the beginning of this movie, Claude and Marie—as part of their second honeymoon announced at the end of the last film—are set to depart on a whirlwind voyage to Abidjan, Algiers, Tel Aviv, and Beijing. André has requested that Claude bring him a large ham, but Clovis the dog—who has developed a taste for non-kosher flesh—sinks his teeth into it first.
When the Verneuils return from their off-screen travels, they reunite the family and back-handedly insult their sons-in-law while describing their trip: Claude says of Algiers that “Not everything was thrown away after decolonization”; Marie’s favorite part of their trip to Israel was the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, Not-Israel (David and Rachid then fight over what this territory is called; have I mentioned that Rachid is Algerian?); they try to say nice things about China but fall back on its pollution and its “food market of horrors” (incidentally, this movie came out in 2019).
And so we have a replay of the scenario of the first, where the parents alienate the children, threatening to send Marie into a depression. The subplot with Viviane and Nicole is a rehash of the second half of the first, where André must (once again) overcome his prejudices and allow his child to marry. Claude is off the hook this time. In fact, he knows Viviane’s secret and positively relishes the aneurysm André will have when he learns that Viviane’s fiancé “Nicolas” is really a woman. In the end, André does require hospitalization, and he maximally abuses the Verneuils’ hospitality (as he did in the first) during his convalescence.
But, thematically, the second installment is quite different from the first. The first one poses the question: “What are these freaks doing in my wonderful country?” The second one asks: “Why do these freaks want to leave my wonderful country?” Indeed, none of the sons-in-law want to remain in France, possibly because they saw the first movie. Rachid is tired of cases involving women’s clothing, notably the “burkini.” David can’t finance his stupid business ventures. Chao is (prophetically) concerned about rising violence against Asians, so he buys nunchaku and some shuriken (in screenwriting class, you call this Chekhov’s shuriken; also, Chao is impressively a master of both Chinese and Japanese martial arts). Finally, Charles is pissed that he is relegated to stereotypical roles and that a local production of Othello cast a white guy as the lead.
Rachid, David, and Chao want to return to their respective homelands; Charles, who wants to be as far from his father as possible, believes he can make it big in Bollywood. The threat that the sons-in-law would take away the Verneuil girls is the actual conflict of this film, the one that causes Marie to exclaim the titular question “What have we done to deserve this AGAIN?” and inspires Claude to rectify the situation through bribery, literal crisis actors, and outright fraud. People Claude has paid off show up offering new professional ventures at suspiciously opportune moments. When that doesn’t work in the case of Chao, Marie forwards a doctored photo of him at a pro-Tibet rally to the Chinese embassy.
Most Questionable Moment: The Tibet stuff is completely dwarfed by the saga of Arash. Arash is an Afghan intellectual who has fled the Taliban and is residing with the curé of the local church as part of a refugee program. The priest suggests that Marie take him on as a gardener because of their large estate. Not only do they put him in the shed, where he develops back problems, but Claude takes an immediate dislike to him because he hates his face (stating something to this effect) and thinks he prays too intently. The rest of the family is not apprised of his existence, so when Chao sees Arash carrying a chainsaw around the property, he throws his shuriken at him. That’s only the second-most degrading thing to happen to him. One of the daughters buys Arash a belt to help him with his back. When Claude catches Arash putting on this belt, it confirms his worst suspicions, and this happens:
This is the point where the Verneuil girls suggest that maybe papa’s attitude is the reason that the sons-in-law want to leave France. Meanwhile, Arash vows to return to Kabul (but he attends the wedding at the end for some godforsaken reason). This already terrible subplot has aged like fine milk. I cannot begin to fathom what the film gained from it, but it adds the extra layer of awful that makes the second installment stand out from the others.
Serial (Bad) Weddings 3 (Qu’est-ce qu’on a TOUS fait au Bon Dieu?, Philippe de Chauveron, 2022)
The second movie did not replicate the success of the first, but that was not a sufficient deterrent. The third film came out only a couple of weeks ago, and it is the weakest of the three. The first two were not my idea of “good,” but they at least had an overarching theme, a central conflict, and some recurring motifs (i.e., recycled jokes). I can’t quite pinpoint the thesis of the third film, which departs from the structure of the first two. Clovis the dog doesn’t even eat something this time—he just pees on a painting. Everything else is Z-grade sitcom plots. Here are a few of them:
Front and center in the advertising is the plotline where the parents of the sons-in-law are flown in to participate in the fortieth wedding anniversary of Claude and Marie. I would say they are hateful stereotypes, but I don’t know if any of them even rise to the level of stereotype. The worst of the bunch are Chao’s parents. He (Bing Yin) is a control freak; she (Li Heling) is a problem drinker. For David’s parents (Daniel Russo and Nanou Garcia), my solitary note says “bickering.” Rachid’s dad (Abbes Zahmani) is an aging rocker who will provide the end credits song. His mother (Farida Ouchani) is a woman. They contribute very little to the plot other than initiating violent altercations at a local club, causing Marie to exclaim the titular question while they cool off in the slammer (“What have we ALL done to deserve this?”)
One of the other subplots involves Rachid and David, who are now neighbors and have a turf war over David’s apple trees. David builds a wall between their houses; Rachid responds by digging a tunnel between their two estates, just like in that one season of Fauda. While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a bottomless well of humor, like cancer, dead babies, or the Holocaust, it feels a bit trivialized here, especially since it’s facilely resolved by the parents yelling at their sons. Have I mentioned that Rachid is Algerian?
In Charles’ corner, he has been cast in a color-blind play based on the Gospels in the role of Jesus. Boy, does this movie make a lot of noise about a Black Jesus. It came out right before Easter, and, as it happens, I was seasonally inclined to review a number of horrendous Jesus films. One of them has this exact premise, but it did not make a splash because 1) The film is terrible; and 2) No one gives a shit. This is Jesus Christ, after all, not Spider-Man. The characters in this movie give a shit, however, and the in-laws (barring André, who is beaming with pride) are more disturbed by Black Jesus than that the Verneuils are taking them to a 192-minute play that might be offensive to their religious sensibilities. David, at least, brings chips.
Finally, we arrive at what I guess is the A-plot. Ségolène, the only Verneuil girl to have more than one personality trait (she is an artist, and prone to histrionics) has an exhibit in town, and she attracts the attention of German art dealer Helmut Schäfer (Jochen Hägele), who promises to showcase Ségolène’s work in New York. He is the closest thing this series has to an actual villain, since his design is not on her work but on Ségolène herself—not as a romantic interest, but as someone who can bring him closer to the woman he truly desires—Marie!
Claude, meanwhile, notices friction between Chao and Ségolène and hopes that he might be able to replace Chao with Helmut since, as he remarks, he “checks all the boxes.” I don’t know why someone with such a hard-on for The General would want a boche for a son-in-law. Even stranger, Claude is in the midst of writing an alternate history novel where, instead of decamping to London, de Gaulle goes loco down in Acapulco, leading to a situation where he is not there to single-handedly fight off the Nazis. This question applies to every entry in this series, but… what the hell is wrong with Claude?!
Most Questionable Moment: There is a bizarre flashback to the Verneuils’ trip to Beijing, where they visit Chao’s parents but mistakenly knock at the wrong door, leading to some forced “They all look the same” shenanigans. Then there is a call-back when the Lings come to France, and Mr. Ling does not recognize Claude. Frankly, the detail that offended me the most—worse than the implication that Claude is a crypto-fascist—is that Mrs. Ling carries a selfie stick.
Gavin McDowell is a Hoosier by birth and French by adoption. He received his doctorate in “Languages, History, and Literature of the Ancient World from the Beginning until Late Antiquity” and is currently investigating Aramaic translations of the Bible. He is supremely unqualified to talk about film. For more of his unprovoked movie opinions, see his Letterboxd account.
Bad French Cinema Index
Part 1: French Films with Famous Remakes
Part 2: French Animation
Part 3: Serial (Bad) Weddings
Part 4: Live-Action Fairy Tales
Part 5: The Tuche Family
Part 6: Asterix and Obelix