WHITE WEDDING
Directed by Jann Turner
Produced by Written & Produced by Turner, Rapulana Seiphemo & Kenneth Nkosi
Released by Little Film Company/Dada Films
English, Zulu, Afrikaans & Xhosa with English subtitles
South Africa. 93 min. Not Rated
With Kenneth Nkosi, Rapulana Seiphemo, Zandile Mstuwana, Jodie Whittaker, Sylvia Mngxekeza, Marcel van Heerden & Mbulelo Grootboom
 

At a time when Hollywood has forgotten how to make sparkling grown-up romantic comedies (with a sprig of feel-good social commentary), White Wedding serves up freshly blended love, laughs, and life lessons.

The standard ingredients of predictable nuptial nonsense are given an enjoyable new spin in contemporary, middle-class, multiracial, multilingual South Africa—the rowdy bachelor party, the get-the-groom-to-the-church-on-time obstacle race, the return of an ex-boyfriend, the mother who wants a traditional celebration, and the modern bride who wants everything to be perfectly proper.

Elvis (Kenneth Nkosi), the jovial, kindhearted groom, misses his bus from Johannesburg to Durban when he stops to be a Good Samaritan. His oldest friend and best man, the womanizing Tumi (Rapulana Seiphemo), doesn’t wait for him to celebrate and parties with several lovely ladies. The beautiful and thin bride, Ayanda (Zandile Mstuwana), smoothly switches between speaking English with her fey wedding planner and the township patois with her ample mother. Between dress fittings and the unexpected arrival of her Americanized ex-boyfriend, she frantically calls her fiancé. He’s not only late with payments, but for all of his wedding obligations.

Elvis and Tumi get lost on a hook-or-by-crook road trip across the wide South African veldt; intermittent phone service, escalating borrowed car troubles, and goat transport are only some of their comic travails. They meet up with Rose (Jodie Whittaker), a talkative young Englishwoman hitchhiker on the rebound from a cheating fiancé. (She’s too scatterbrained, let alone naïve, to be a credible doctor, except that she’s handy in a medical emergency.) This scenario was inspired by a journey the debut director took with her co-writers/co-stars. A white woman traveling across 21^st century-South Africa with two black men is an intriguing set-up for cultural misunderstandings and romance, but their differences prove less significant than their commonalities.

The odd threesome drive from the bride’s grandparents’ rural village to the (inevitable) car breakdown near an Afrikaans stronghold, similar to the American stereotype of the Southern cracker town. The place seems stuck in the apartheid past, what with signs for segregated bathrooms and a Springboks rugby game on the television in the bar (a la Clint Eastwood’s Invictus). Potential confrontations are charmingly deflected with good humor, though, which keeps this easy-going movie entertaining (even if the jokes about a guy’s English wife don’t quite export).

When the disappointed bride’s starchy European-style “white wedding” plans fall apart, the neighboring township women all step in to help, like they have for generations. The whole community joins in the joyful singing and dancing, which will be pretty irresistible to the audience, too. Nora Lee Mandel
September 3, 2010