‘Orange-Flavoured Wedding’ review: Adele Exarchopoulos leads Christophe Honore’s propulsive, poignant 1970s ensemble drama

Dir/scr: Christophe Honore. France. 2026. 115mins

It’s 1978 in the western French city of Nantes (birthplace, incidentally or not, of the great Jacques Demy, something of a spiritual and creative touchstone for director Christophe Honore). After a wedding, the cortege set off for the reception in barely-controlled chaos as cars full of chattering, excited guests try to find a gap in the traffic. And the energy levels stay high from that point on. Honore’s colourful drama is a propulsive but also poignant and nostalgic choral work that portrays a working-class family from the pre-digital era as a perpetual-motion machine, somehow rolling on down the road of life despite having several broken or badly patched-up moving parts.

Feels like something of a new departure for the prolific director

A tasty addition to the all-in-a-day wedding genre represented most memorably by Robert Altman’s A Wedding, Honore’s 17th feature is, unlike that biting satire, full of empathy for its diversely fucked-up family members, though equally adroit in the way it teases their individual stories out of the weave. It feels like something of a new departure for the prolific director and – despite the slightly clunky English language title – could re-energise his box office fortunes both at home in France and elsewhere following its bow in Cannes Premiere.

Staying texturally close on faces, pulling out to chart the dance of characters, capturing in medium shots the duos, trios and quartets that split and form over the course of an evening, veteran DoP Jean Lapoirie brings warmth but also curiosity to her handheld framings – like a nature photographer who’s moonlighting as wedding videographer. One after another, the seven Puig siblings – the youngest of whom is the groom – their relatives and friends emerge from the background noise (and there’s plenty of that).

Adele Exarchopolous’ Claudie is a fragile emotional wreck, still damaged from the collapse of her marriage. The volatile Roger (Paul Kircher) has anger-management issues that derive at least in part, it’s revealed, from his army service during the French repression of the Algerian independence movement. Easy-going, likeable Dominique (Vincent Lacoste) is the soul of the party, but he has his own issues having just lost his job after being caught stealing by his boss’s wife.

The script follows these rumbles and couplings, flares and lulls with a sense of rhythm syncopated by the fluid editing of another great French cinema artisan, Chantal Hymans. Three interleaved scenes leap forward in time to fill us in on the future lives and deaths of this family caught, in a feature-length snapshot, in a rare, perhaps never to be repeated convivium. It’s a bold, undisciplined move, one that breaks the energy of the wedding party but also brings a melancholic, prophetic note to the proceedings. It forces us to see a roomful of tired kids – surrounded by wedding party debris – as the adults they will become, inheritors of all this weight of sorrow and joy.

That note is sounded in the first scene by a striking counterpoint, when the joyous bustle of the marriage cortege is overlain by the elegiac strains of 19th century composer Guillaume Lekeu’s ’Adagio for Strings’. Music is central to a film that depicts life as an ensemble concert. Soaked in the grainy analogue atmospheres of its late 1970s setting, Orange-Flavoured Wedding will stir nostalgia in local audiences with needle drops that include local singers like Claude Francois, whose death in a road accident is woven into the story – but English-language tracks such as ’In a Broken Dream’ by Python Lee Jackson add to a rich and flavorsome mix.