Movie Review - Mail Order Wife (USA)

We saw Mail Order Wife last night.

The film is surreal. It's a comedy pretending it's not a comedy. It starts off as a real documentary with screen notes and you buy it for a while until things start to go crazy.

Adrian lets Andrew film his search for a mail order bride. Andrew is a less than stellar husband and Lichi (the wife) runs to seek help from Andrew, one of the only other people she knows in this country. Lichi grows on you as you find out that she went from one bad situation to another. She flips back and forth between husbands and then you find out how much of a freak she really is. Not only is she desperate to bear a child, she has an obsession with pigs. Not the real kind, or the human kind (even though she's stuck with two of them (pun intended)) but the cheesy decorative kind.

The temper tantrums she has about pigs and having babies are one of the funniest parts of the film. It must have taken make tries to get the scene off because I am sure the actors had a hard time keeping straight faces.

You lose sympathy for Lichi when you find that she's even more of a freak than we thought. The two husbands, who can't stand each other but are forced to tolerated each other's company, cook up a wild scheme to rectify the situation. This is a great opportunity to bring in play yet another freaky character with his own individual motives.

Of course the situations all veer of course and it's funny to see how they resolve themselves.