I have friends who believe that weddings are needlessly stressful. It’s their opinion that a celebration of love should be simple and informal; a gathering on a single day, important not for its own sake but for what it represents. Don’t go overboard, they say: just have fun.
Some of those friends are married now, and I don’t think a single one of them managed to pull off their wedding day without nearly pulling out their hair, too. The idea of a low-key wedding is a wonderful one, but flawed. Weddings cannot be low-key—there’s too much to plan. We want our friends and relatives to be present, comfortable, and well fed on the big day—all of them, at the same time. But people have busy lives. Sometimes they’re spread across the planet. The only way to get them all together in one place, at once, is to mark the event as one of immense importance, never to be duplicated. And this is not—it cannot—be a relaxing thing.
This is the genesis of everything René Clair’s The Italian Straw Hat will become. Before it turns farce, before it turns surreal, it is simply the story of a family on the day of a wedding; building tension, and material, from the dozens of nitpicky things people do when they’re desperate to make everything turn out right.
