Tag: films

I recently rewatched Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). It’s still a great film, ageing better than, for instance, the more recent Love Actually (2003). (Keira Knightley has commented on the creepiness of the infamous cue card scene of the latter.)

I had forgotten Matthew’s deeply moving speech at his partner Gareth’s funeral, and how the priest introduced Matthew as “Gareth’s closest friend”.

In the (original?) script, the priest introduces him simply as “Matthew” – no “partner” but also no “closest friend” euphemism.

The camera directions note: “Cut aways during the poem should include Gareth’s parents – it would be nice to feel they understand Matthew.”

Matthew mentions in his speech that “Gareth used to prefer funerals to weddings. He said it was easier to get enthusiastic about a ceremony one had an outside chance of eventually being involved in.”

There’s a lot going on. Four straight weddings and a gay funeral.

Same-sex marriage has been legal in Britain since 2014 – 20 years after Four Weddings! – and in Northern Ireland only since January 2020. I wonder in twenty years how we will look back at the discrimination against trans and nonbinary people that’s interwowen with society.

Matthew’s speech concludes with a poem, Funeral Blues: “As for me, you may ask how I will remember him, what I thought of him. Unfortunately, there I run out of words. Perhaps you will forgive me if I turn for my own feelings to the words of another splendid bugger, W. H. Auden. This is actually what I want to say.”

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message ‘He is Dead’.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.