WE BROKE UP

US, 2021, 80 minutes, Colour.

Aya Cash, William Jackson Harper, Sarah Bolger, Tony Cavalier, Peri Gilpin.

Directed by Jeff Rosenberg.

This is a brief comedy, with dramatic implications, set at a wedding celebration.

The focus is on a couple, Doug and Lori, who have been together for 10 years but don’t seem to have given any major thought to marriage or two family. They have been close friends, partners, each of them involved in their own particular work. After 10 years, without there seeming to realise it, they have drifted apart. Lori wants to break up. Doug is shocked and certainly does not want to break up.

The complication of the plot is that they are inviting to the wedding of Lori’s sister, quite the opposite of Lori. She has met a divorcee and been with him for only a month but there has been whirlwind courtship and the decision to marry. The women’s mother is also highly critical and intervening – and advised to keep out.

For the sake of the decorum of the wedding, Lori and Doug decide to conceal the breakup and act as if nothing happened. There are all kinds of comic situations arising, potentially embarrassing to each party. Surprisingly for the audience, and for them, they have a night of reconciliation and Doug proposes.

Further comic situations with the announcement of the engagement, then the celebration of the wedding, more intervention from the mother – and a final decision to break up, Lori going on her own independent way leaving Doug sad and wounded.

1. The title? Relationships? Ten-year relationships? Love, tensions? Crises, small incidents, breakups?
2. An American wedding? Extroverted, loud, exuberant, demonstrative?
3. The settings, the camp, cabins, dining rooms… Exteriors for the wedding? The musical score?
4. Lori and Doug’s story, age, 10 years together, his work as editor, her work in the diner? The initial meeting, tensions and moods, arguments, the breakup? Lori and her personality, not sympathetic for the audience? Audience sympathy for Doug?
5. The morning after, the decision about the wedding, packing, driving, the decision to pretend they were together? The comedy consequences, covering, timing?
6. Beer and Jason, their exuberance and the phone images, the backgrounds, her being young, wilful in the past, her making the wristbands? Jason, age, divorce, child, new beginning? Admitting who had not grown up? Neither of them?
7. The mother, intervening, critical of beer, wanting Lori to marry Dougie?
8. The Paul Bunyan day, machinations, the competition, the aftermath? Doug and the visitor from England, her amazement about the wedding and its style? Lori, meeting the student from school? The flirting, the judgements? The aftermath, Lori upset?
9. The reconciliation, the night together, the decision for the engagement? Telling beer and Jason? The mother? Silence and secrecy?
10. Beer, her mother’s criticism, Lori and harsh attitudes? Are running away? Jason desperate? Standing up to the mother? The search for beer, finding her, going ahead with the wedding?
11. Lori and Doug, his regrets after 10 years, wanting to marry, his dreams? Lori not able to consent?
12. The light tone at the beginning, moving into deeper themes with the breakup, the different ambitions between the two, a final incompatibility?