Solenn & Nico

Why are we here? It’s to celebrate a mystery: le mystère de l’amour. The mystery of love.

Without a doubt, Solenn and Nico are a perfect match.  Their devoted family and friends attest to this—and anybody who sees them together will immediately say the same.  The bride’s sister and maid of honor even chides them for having their own weird language and sense of humor, one that only they can decipher. In truth, Solenn and Nico are both genuinely kind and silly and down-to-earth. It makes perfect sense for them to be together.

So it’s difficult to imagine that there was once a time before they fell in love—that there was even a moment in history when Solenn had not known Nico, and Nico had not known Solenn. 

On the day of their wedding, there was an overwhelming sense of ecstatic disbelief.  We hear it from the best man, who said he couldn’t be happier to be there, to testify that something he never believed would happen to Nico was indeed taking place that day.  It is palpable in the face of the groom’s mother, who leans her forehead on his shoulder while they wait for the lovely bride to reach the end of the aisle.  Perhaps it is also what makes the groom repeatedly shake his head, as if waking himself from a dream. But it is absolutely unmistakable in Solenn, who could contain neither laughter nor tears as she recited her vows to her groom.

Perhaps this is le mystère de l’amour of which they speak. That you would be the perfect match for a once-complete stranger, and you would choose to become one flesh with them. That even if they confessed to having a million imperfections, you still believe that you received the better end of the deal, that you got luckier than you had ever dared hope for. And that in spite of your own human limitations, you find the courage to utter promises that would take a lifetime to keep.

The mystery of love is that it gives you every reason to take that plunge into the unpredictable and unknown.  As Solenn and Nico lock lips at the end of the film, we see them pausing and can only guess that they do so to savor that moment before they deliberately and irrevocably said “I do.”