Four Weddings and a Funeral

The only good bit came when you realised that the titular funeral would be dedicated to Simon Callow. I clenched my fist and said yes. No particular disrespect to Simon Callow – but at least one of them was going to die... In any postwar decade other than the present one, Four Weddings would

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have provoked nothing but incredulous disgust. A Sixties audience would have wrecked the cinema. Yet now it seems that the old grievances have evaporated, and ‘the million’, as Hamlet called them, feel free to root for the (congenital) millionaires. They can lapse into a forgetful toadyism, and abase themselves before their historical oppressors. Class is harmless, class is mildly cool; class is even felt to be … classy. Four Weddings is of course deeply ‘sentimental’ in the colloquial sense: it displays a false and unworthy tenderness.

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