“QUEENS”–men, mothers in law and gay weddings

“QUEENS”

Moms, Mothers in Law, and Gay Weddings

Amos Lassen

If you love Almodovar, you will love “Queens” (Regent and Here! TV) and if you don’t love Almodovar, you will love “Queens” anyway. Here is a madcap comedy about the drama of weddings– gay weddings! So often we think of the brides or the grooms–here we get the views of the moms.

Five mothers (the queens) who are headstrong and determined prepare for the mass wedding ceremony of their gay sons (more queens), a tradition newly made possible when Spain legalized unions of members of the same sex. The women in the movie may seem familiar as they are regulars in the films of brilliant Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. The lives of the women are frantic, complicated and full of frenzy. There is one mom who doesn’t care that her son is marrying a man but does care that the guy is a gardener. And there are the sons. Each of them reacts not only to his mother but to the fact that his life as a single man is about to end.

The  movie takes place during one weekend and during that short period of time the queens (the mothers and the sons) create mayhem–what was to have been a moment of happiness goes awry and the worlds of anger, tolerance, sex, bigotry and almost everything else bounce off of each other and those things that were to be neat and orderly become one big mess. The weddings that were certain become pending and we are swept up into a whirlwind of comedic proportions and ill made mistakes. Just thinking of a mass wedding along with the mothers in a tow is a laughing matter. This is a clever movie dealing with a subject that we have not had a chance to see on the screen before. It is presented satirically and makes us realize that mothers at gay weddings are quite the same as mothers at any wedding.

The photography is amazing, the women are wonderful–both sets of queens are beautiful and you will laugh until you think you can’t laugh anymore. You laugh at the mothers, you laugh at the sons, you laugh at the situation. What a treat!