Queerly Ever After #51: MY BIG GAY ITALIAN WEDDING (2018)

Queerly Ever After is a bi-monthly column where I take a look at LGBT+ films that gave their characters a romantic happily-ever-after. There will be spoilers. Also, don’t forget to buy your Queerly Ever After merch right here.

Antonio (Cristiano Caccamo) and Paulo (Salvatore Esposito) are an Italian couple living in gay-friendly Berlin. After Antonio proposes to Paulo, he brings him home to his small Italian village to meet his parents and also come out of the closet. Tagging along are their roommates, Benedatta (Diana Del Bufalo), a woman with an attraction to men who remind her of her father, and Donato Lavopa (Dino Abbrescia), a man recently separated from his wife after she caught him dressing in drag, who also reminds Benedetta of her father.

Upon coming out to his parents, Antonio’s father, Roberto (Diego Abatantuono) will not accept his son’s sexuality or impending marriage, but his mother, Anna (Monica Guerritore), decides she is going to throw her son the perfect wedding. She goes about hiring a famous wedding planner, and she kicks her husband out of the house until he can accept his son. The movie follows Anna, Antonio, and Paulo as they go about planning the wedding. Anna does have one stipulation though, she insists on Paulo’s mother being there. Unfortunately, Paulo and his mother have not spoken since he came out to her and she didn’t accept him. In a last-ditch effort to pretend he got his mother on board, Donato dresses up as Paulo’s mother to give him away. When Benedetta sees Donato as a woman, she realizes she is more attracted to him now that he reminds her of her mother. I am going to say here, for the purposes of this review, I will be using he/him pronouns for Donato as those are the pronouns he uses throughout the film.

Overall, I enjoyed this movie. It’s definitely a broad comedy, but never too broad that it grates on you. Additionally, gay men are not portrayed as stereotypes, just as humans. I thoroughly appreciate that Anna is a mother who will do anything to protect her son, even from her own husband. However, there is one glaring plot point that annoys me to no end, and that is the plot involving Antonio’s ex-girlfriend Camilla (Beatrice Arnera).

Like Nails on a Chalkboard

Camilla is a mess, that’s maybe the nicest thing I can say about a character who Anna describes as “like nails on a chalkboard.” The description is only too apt, and every time her grating character showed up to cause trouble for Antonio and Paulo I wanted to throw her off the mountain upon which this little town was situated. She adds an unnecessary extra layer of drama to the film and it feels like a huge misstep. She still harbors feelings for Antonio and wants to get back together with him, even though she knows he’s gay. After running into him in Berlin at the beginning of the movie, she threatens to tell Paulo about that one time a few months ago they drunkenly slept together. This seems really out of character for Antonio who feels deeply in love with Paulo and I absolutely hate that the writers included this. After Antonio tells her to leave him alone she follows him to Italy. A restraining order would have been a really good idea here.

There’s another plot running while all this is going on. For whatever reason, Antonio has never been able to say “I love you” to Paulo, although he clearly feels that way. I think Camilla’s existence in the movie is really just so she can reveal Antonio’s infidelity at the wedding which causes him to finally shed that emotional barrier and say “I love you” to Paulo and break into song. Again, this was unnecessary. Considering the plot with Antonio’s dad was a significantly more important one than the grating Camilla, they could have used Roberto eventually not only giving Antonio his blessing, but actually performing the marriage ceremony as the catalyst to make Antonio finally say those three words, realizing that what he really needed to overcome that hurdle was the full support of his family.

In Conclusion: My Big Gay Italian Wedding

As I mentioned, I did ultimately enjoy this movie. I just wish it had gone through another revising where Camilla was completely removed from the story. She added nothing and was a pain to have to watch. I’m not saying the actress was at fault, she did fine with what she was given, but that her character had about as much appeal as the smell of hot garbage in a New York City summer, and she took away from the other elements of the film.

What are your thoughts on My Big Gay Italian Wedding? Let us know in the comments!

My Big Gay Italian Wedding was written by Alessandro Genovesi and Giovanni Bognetti, based on Anthony J. Wilkinson’s play of the same name. It was directed by Alessandro Genovesi. It premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival on June 4, 2018. For all other release dates, see here.

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