True Love

Nancy Savoca’s ironically titled first feature (1989) covers the last stages of a two-year engagement and wedding of a Brooklyn couple (Annabella Sciorra and Ron Eldard) who don’t even like each other very much. (The groom continually neglects the bride because he wants to hang out with his male friends; the bride won’t back out of the engagement because of her concern for appearances.) Scripted by Savoca and Richard Guay, the film tries to make this semisatire into something of a social critique, but the characters are so unremittingly repulsive that it’s hard to care very much what happens to them, and Savoca is so steeped in the milieu she purports to criticize that her observations about it are superficial at best. Uninteresting as filmmaking and not very successful as comedy, the film claims superiority to its hapless characters without doing enough to earn it. (JR)

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