The life of a mail order bride, in all its ambition and awkwardness, is the subject of Marta Bergman’s debut fiction feature ALONE AT MY WEDDING (Seule a mon mariage). Released last May, Bergman’s film was shown as part of ACID Cannes 2018 and is up for the Audience Award in this year’s Glasgow Film Festival.
Bergman is a well-established documentary filmmaker and much of her work features Roma communities. Her most recent documentary, UN JOUR MON PRINCE VIENDRA, followed three young Roma girls searching for a better life with a western man, which became the inspiration for ALONE AT MY WEDDING. Bergman created a fiction film in order to answer the question of what could happen to young girls selling themselves as mail order brides.
The protagonist, Pamela (Alina Serban), is adventurous and determined, she doesn’t want to remain in the snow-covered Romanian village where she lives with her grandmother and two-year old daughter. Against all difficulties she joins an agency who matches her with a “nice” Frenchman, Bruno (Tom Vermeir), and after an awkward and stilted Skype call she travels to Belgium to begin her new life, leaving her daughter behind.
The storyline is slow and a lot of time is given to establish the character and motivations of Pamela, but things move faster once she arrives in Belgium. The film can then play around with the unlikely pairing of Bruno and his young girlfriend. There is a fantastically awkward scene when Bruno introduces her to his favourite Flemish rock band and tells her to dance. Things get worse for Pamela as she tries to reconcile her decision with her real desires and the yearning to be reunited with her daughter and grandmother.
Although the establishment is slow, it works well with the subject matter and the intimate camerawork, which really place you in the perspective of the young protagonist. ALONE AT MY WEDDING is a highly sympathetic film, the audience can easily put themselves in Pamela’s shoes (or at least I can as a young woman). You constantly question her actions and ask yourself what you would do in the same situation; which succeeds in conveying the precarious and self-doubting mindset of the character, and indeed any girl who decides to become a mail order bride.
The acting from Alina Serban is very natural and engaging. The film uses predominantly natural sound, along with choice electro compositions from Romanian composer Vlaicu Golcea who worked closely with Bergman. In an interview with Cineuropa, Bergman said that “these musical compositions are the aural embodiment of Pamela’s state of mind and emotions”.
The characters in ALONE AT MY WEDDING are together in their loneliness: Bruno lives a life of solitude, Pamela’s parents are both dead, her grandmother is left alone when Pamela travels to Belgium. Yet the ending of the film is pretty positive and manages to abolish this sense of being alone. The alleged wedding never actually occurs, and Pamela is able to realise her dream of finding her daughter.
Bergman summarises her film by saying it tells the tale of “a woman who finds freedom, who thinks that she needs a man in order to find it, but who discovers that she can actually find it all by herself.”