Review: Second-Hand Wedding – gorgeous Wellington comedy that can’t be recommended strongly enough

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If ever there was proof that Wellington is more than capable of art house films of international stature, Second-Hand Wedding is it. This gorgeous comedy had me both in fits of laugher and sent tears streaming down my face when we saw it last night at the Lighthouse in Pauatahanui. It was well up there with recent Wellington film landmarks the comedy Eagle v Shark and the minuscule-budget thriller When Night Falls as among the best of its kind.

Set and filmed on the Kapiti Coast, the plot is straightforward. Mum and school principal Jill Rose (Geraldine Brophy) fanatically goes round garage sales every Saturday seeking bargains that so fill her house, she even has two microwave ovens on her kitchen bench. Her daughter, teacher Cheryl (Holly Shanahan), named after the John Rowles song Cheryl Moana Marie, accepts a marriage proposal from car mechanic boyfriend Stew (Ryan O’Kane) but is too scared to tell mum for fear that mum will turn her wedding into a bargain basement event like a garage sale.

Cheryl is nonetheless close to and confides in her patient dad Brian (Patrick Wilson), a retired security guard who met Jill when he stopped her breaking in to a long-ago John Rowles concert she arrived at after the doors were locked when her bus was late. Brian spends much of the film rebuilding a Model T Ford in his garage and doting on Jill despite her mania for buying junk, in one poignant scene obviously wanting to make love with her after quite some time, but she just kisses him good night and goes to sleep. His sympathetic character adds much to the film, especially when he has a crisis I won’t describe here as I don’t want to give away too much of the plot.

Similarly, I don’t want to say more, but there is a knee-trembling (for women Jill’s age) cameo by John Rowles himself that actually works, yet could have seemed staged in any lesser film.

In the scene that had me in tears, so well was it scripted and acted, Gracie (Vivien Bell), the teacher who missed out on the principal’s job Jill got, spitefully reveals to Jill that Cheryl is engaged but hasn’t told her because she’s so embarrassed by her mother’s obsession with bargains. Only a parent could feel so devastated by learning what their loved child so honestly thinks about them, and Jill takes this brutal truth with heartbreaking misery.

Meanwhile, Cheryl and Stew sign up for a wedding breakfast at a sumptuous though pretentious local establishment, thinking the $6000 they have paid is the full cost, only to find the bill is $24,000, a sum they are incapable of raising. The establishment’s manager Daniela (Gentiane Lupi) is a deliciously nasty piece of work and it is fantastic to see her get hers later in the film.

First-time director Paul Murphy (son of Goodbye Pork Pie’s Geoff Murphy, who cleverly has made a Mini a feature of the film along with the Model T) gained his experience in commercials and film production and has created a truly heart-warming, funny, beautiful Wellington and Kiwi movie (filmed digitally, not on celluloid, but unlike with When Night Falls you can’t see a difference) that I cannot recommend strongly enough.

Second-Hand Wedding, starring Geraldine Brophy, Patrick Wilson, Holly Shanahan, Ryan O’Kane, Tina Regtien, Ray Henwood, directed by Paul Murphy, screenplay by Linda Niccol from a story by Nick Ward. Garage Sale Productions, Wellington, 98 minutes, PG. ****

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