Drama Review – Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s controversial wedding movie delivers on its promise

HHow many past things do you have to reveal to your beloved partner before the big day? Tricky news may be avoided in anticipation of a party, but it can still be sloppily produced by gullible young adults who think the worms can’t be that big or that many – or that it’s hard to get back into the can.

Such a situation is the center of this fictional but funny, deeply disturbing film from Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli; A “Euro-satire” of American bourgeois desire aimed at discontent and melancholy in the spirit of Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure or Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen.

Charlie, played by Robert Pattinson, is an inquisitive young British historian living in the US who meets the mysterious Emma, ​​played by Zendaya, in a coffee shop. Struck by her beauty as she sits reading, Charlie approaches, but since she is deaf in one ear and listening to music in the other, Emma at first does not hear her desperate attempts at conversation, and Charlie, taking this as an insult, is mortified. But soon the ice is broken, a bright love story begins, and misunderstandings will cause chaos for the wedding speech.

But Borgli shows something terrifying in this episode, putting a psycho-horror twist on romcom tropes. The sound design is amazing, the strange sounds sound so quiet, closing the lid and uncomfortable, the unheard wooden figures on the soundtrack. As their wedding day approaches, Charlie and Emma go to a drunken dinner with their friends Rachel (Alana Haim) and Mike (Mamoudou Athie), where they all dare to say the worst things they’ve ever done.

At this time, those who are squeamish about spoilers or analysis of the story should look away now, because Emma reveals that when she was 14 years old (played in flashback by Jordyn Curet) she intended to do so but she could not go through the high school shooting, and that her deaf disability, far from being due to the most painful trauma was to hold her baby who was very close to the baby his. his ear while practicing shooting in the forest.

Borgli invents a horrible and ironic excuse for Emma to support. As he reached for the gun hidden in his bag, the school heard that there was a shooting at the local mall, killing their friend; his plan was broken and ruined, so he had to forget it. It’s an appeal that Bret Easton Ellis would have loved.

Emma hopes that everyone will get over this sudden revelation, or accept her assurance that she is normal now. But everyone is confused. They cannot hear what they heard. Charlie senses their picture-perfect relationship beginning to crumble.

So The Drama is an uncomfortably offensive metaphor for two American phenomena: the Hollywood wedding comedy and the high school shooting. Part of its genius is this general ambiguity: satire or comedy? We may not be convinced of the tone in which the mystery is presented; its status as a macabre black-comic absurdity depends on accepting Emma’s complete recovery. The female shooter is rare compared to the male shooter, but Borgli’s text presents that contrast with examples.

Charlie begins to wonder if Emma’s hidden violent tendencies may be resurfacing. And the film makes a serious point that there are probably thousands of people like them walking among us: the mystery is close to the killers who didn’t get over it and return to normality.

The film falls short in what it tells us about the aftermath of the crime: what teenage Emma did and how she reacted in the weeks and months after the actual shooting that stole her thunder. Charlie is not convinced, and he even compares it to Lacombe’s project of Louis Malle, Lucien, but in fact it makes a kind of encouraging impression of what he was and who he is, and Emma and Charlie would certainly have tried to tell their friends all this, especially Rachel who is scared. And then there’s the ending, where I think Borgli loses his nerve a bit.

The drama has the spiky, witty, tasteless style of his previous film Dream Scenario, and both are superior to his darkly narcissistic comedy Sick of Myself. It gives us a challenge, a a mind game angst, a mental meltdown that is more cleverly portrayed than in many other tightly plotted films. And it gives us what it promises in the title.