Kiss the Bride (2002)

            This is not a particularly remarkable movie, although it was good enough to win several awards at different film festivals.  What is remarkable is the fact that Vanessa Parise wrote the screenplay, directed the film, participated as one of the producers and acted a significant role as one of the four sisters.  It's also her first feature length film for any of these categories.  This was a low budget, short shooting time, one-woman Herculean effort.  I didn't know any of this before I watched it and I found these facts truly amazing in retrospect.       

The story is about an Italian-American family set in a small Rhode Island Atlantic coast town.  The film opens with a scene near the conclusion of the story, then flashes back to all the events leading up to it.  There's a clever twist here that you don't discover until the end.  The main storyline involves three sisters, Niki, Chrissy and Toni, returning home for Danisa's wedding.  The parents and grandparents are traditional as is Dinisa.  However, Niki is a Los Angeles TV actress, Chrissy is a successful Wall Street manager of a financial fund and Toni is a motorcycle-riding, lesbian rebel.  The initial happy confluence of these diverse characters quickly moves toward fireworks. 

Burt Young plays Santo, the girl's father.  He's been in more than 100 films beginning in 1970.  Parise plays Chrissy.  She graduated from Harvard magna cum laude in biology, and was accepted to enter Harvard Medical School the subsequent fall.  Instead, she entered a two-year theatre program.  Then she turned to films instead of medicine as a career path.

This is essentially a story about thirty-something women facing their first identity crisis.  The camera work was professional and the dramatic motivations were well thought out and nicely executed.  The faults lay in too much action and not enough character development.  The support actors were also a bit weak, with the notable exception of grandma Julia played by Frances Bay.  She provided some of the best comic relief.

Reviewed October 31, 2005                Copyright 2005 Charles T. Markee

MPAA: Rated R for language, some drug use and brief nudity.