Muriel's Wedding

Muriel's Wedding is a comedy by Australian filmmaker P. J. Hogan, who shortly after would repeat his success filming in the United States La boda de mi best friend. It is a Franco-Australian co-production.

Plot

Muriel (Toni Collette) lives in a small Australian town called Porpoise Spit, a place filled with shopping malls, water parks and Tupperware gatherings. Muriel finds life there boring as hell. She spends her days at home listening to ABBA music and dreaming of her wedding day. The problem is that she has never had a friend who could be considered a suitor, nor has she ever dated a man alone. Her friends turn their backs on her for this reason and for considering her weird and outdated. One day Muriel finds her first job as a cosmetics seller and asks her mother to leave her money to buy the goods she needs to do her job, but with that money she goes on vacation following her old friends in the tropics, where he meets Rhonda, an old childhood friend who is somewhat crazy. She changes her name from Muriel to Mariel.

When Muriel returns to Porpoise Spit, her parents realize she has spent the money on a vacation, and Muriel runs away from home, moving into Rhonda's apartment and working as a cashier at a video store. In her free time, Muriel visits wedding dress shops and makes a photo album with herself as a model with almost all the wedding dresses in town. Rhonda, soon disabled by a spinal tumor, discovers her peculiar hobby and their relationship deteriorates.

After the estrangement between the two friends, Muriel decides to browse the contact pages of a newspaper, and finds a guy looking for a girlfriend. Upon meeting him, she discovers that it is a cover for a foreign swimmer to marry an Australian girl and live together for a while, in order to obtain nationality and go to the Olympic Games. Muriel accepts and sees her dream come true: to marry in white.

Shortly Muriel's father separates from her mother; she is she commits suicide by not being able to bear it, and Muriel separates from her and returns with her friend Rhonda of hers.

The film depicts a family where the domineering character of the father completely overrides the rest of the family; Others such as love, friendship, women's work and economic independence, youth, the cult of the body, immigration to legalize a situation, etc. are developed from this theme.

Characters

• Muriel: main character, whose sole purpose was to marry.
• Rhonda: friend of Muriel's childhood, who stays paralytic after a tumor in the spine.
• Muriel's Father: Machista man who only looks for himself.
• Mother of Muriel: a woman who only did what her husband said.
• Friends of Muriel: those who told Muriel that they did not want to go with her because of her appearance.
• David Van Arckle: South African swimmer seeking a marriage of convenience.

Awards

The film won four Australian Film Institute Awards and earned seven nominations.