‘Muriel’s Wedding’ is an extraordinary blend of the comic and the tragic and it hits layers of emotional depth in so doing which many films fail to elicit. It also prefigures ‘Mamma Mia’ in the way that the music of Abba is being used in a manner that underscores the emotional trajectory of its heroine, Muriel (Toni Collette), whose failures and rejections in life have a healing and cathartic dimension through Abba’s music and which allows her to retreat into a rare positive space in her dysfunctional family life. With a crooked politician for a father and a catatonic mother who is cheated on and abused, Muriel has a large number of siblings all of whom are unemployed and vindictive.

Muriel resorts to shoplifting in order to be able to have something decent to wear at the wedding of one of the local mean girls who find Muriel embarrassing to be around and don’t mince their words in conveying this to her face. Muriel tries to reinvent herself, using money stolen from her unsuspecting mother, and flees to Sydney where she develops a friendship with Rhonda (Rachel Griffiths) who has a joie de vivre which attracts the otherwise morose Muriel and we see Muriel face down her family and choose a differently configured lifestyle, one of her choosing, which she proceeds to enjoy while at the same time trying to fulfil her fantasy of one day getting married in a lavish ceremony with a white dress.

Having little money, she visits all the bridal shops in Sydney where she creates stories about an ailing mother in order to engender sympathy and concessions to enable her to purchase her outfit. But, Muriel is no less of a pathological liar than her father, whose dishonest political manoeuvrings see him evicting the Aboriginal population from their land and even boasting about it. While the relationship between Muriel and Rhonda is not presented as having a sexual element, there is a level of kinship and intensity between them which is not found in any other relationship in the film, and we see this play out in the incompatible scenarios that unfold in which Muriel dreams of a white wedding with an ideal male partner while being unable to sustain any such heterosexual relations.

Rhonda has a major health crisis and it is the way Muriel responds to her needs that form the centrepiece of this implicitly same-sex liaison. What strikes with ‘Muriel’s Wedding’ is that this is a film that uses the mantle of comedy in order to introduce and run wild with moments of tragedy and desperation which work so well precisely because of the way comedy is used as a framing device. It is a deceptively satirical and intricate character study which allows a variety of emotional registers to be delineated against the backdrop of what is ostensibly a feelgood work.

Crucially, it is boundary-breaking, at least by mid-1990s standards, when it was made, by the way it queries and deconstructs the extent to which relationship happiness can be measured in terms of conventional marriage. Though dated and structurally uneven in many respects, ‘Muriel’s Wedding’ is a taboo-crushing study of feminine empowerment and the unorthodox routes open to anyone seeking to live one’s own dreams uncircumscribed by societal norms.