Son of the Bride
dir. Juan Jóse Campanella
Opens Fri April 5 at Broadway Market.
It's no coincidence that, in your basic midlife-crisis movie, a heart attack brings on epiphany. Of course you would re-examine your life after a failure of the heart. In the worst of the genre, the discovery of the heart (however flawed) is the last missing piece in a life that's come undone, and sanctity usually follows. In Son of the Bride, by Argentine director Juan José Campanella, epiphany is not the end but the beginning.
Rafael Belvedere (Ricardo DarÃn) can barely keep his restaurant afloat, let alone commit to a relationship with his part-time daughter (Gimena Nóbile) or his requisite young peach of a girlfriend (Natalia Verbeke). After his heart attack, brought on by a dish of tiramisu, Rafael's first vague instinct is to "drop out"--to escape to Mexico and breed horses or something. But his second impulse is a modicum less selfish: to spend more time with his daughter, get back together with his ex-wife, and help his father toward his own weird pipe dream, which is to give his Alzheimer's-stricken wife of 44 years the church wedding she always wanted.
It turns out that just because Rafael has infarcted toward the light doesn't mean that everyone else is ready for his revelation, which is this movie's strength, and a lesson for anyone who would make a feel-good movie. Campanella is not afraid to examine the selfishness of do-goodery, of the futile gesture (why give a wedding to a woman who won't remember it the next day?), while still allowing us to be moved by it.
And then there's addled Norma (Norma Aleandro), her husband's angel, her son's harpy, who stubbornly refuses to be either, who tends to say inconvenient things just when a moment begs for sentiment (with one or two exceptions made lovely by the rule). Her refusal to be a good sick person is the film's moral center, and a relief in the parade of admirable-because-disabled films this year.
