Chabert Watch! The Wedding Veil - Unveiled (2022)

Watched:  03/03/2025

Format:  Hallmark

Viewing:  First

Director:  Terry Ingram

heads-up:  If you're here for 100% Chabert content, I am going to alert you now, Lacey Chabert is a supporting character/ Executive Producer on this movie, and not the star.  But watching the Chabert filmography will mean sometimes she is not the lead.  I know.  I can't believe it either.

Job:  Art Prof

new skill:  I'd say researching art, but that is literally her job.  So, I guess, making lace?

Man: Paolo Bernardini

Job of Man:  Sales and Marketing for a lace company?

Goes to/ Returns to:  Goes to Venice

Event:  None?

Food:  I am sure they ate Italian food and talked about it

Budgets on Hallmark films make no sense to me.  

We're making our way through the Wedding Veil series, I guess.  It's a five movie (to date) series about a magical wedding veil that forces people to fall in love.  Frankly - its power is terrifying.  

Three Hallmark stars (Chabert, Autumn Reeser and Allison Sweeney) buy the veil together, as their "something borrowed" item they'll all wear.  And the first movie sees Lacey Chabert fall in love with a terrible, terrible human who looks like a Bad Boy version of Mikey Day.  

This is the best the veil can do?

Regarding budgets - the first movie ostensibly took place in San Francisco and Boston, but that was clearly Canada.  Nice locales, but nothing you don't see in many-a-mid-budget Hallmark flick.  

But the sequel, The Wedding Veil Unveiled (2022) - starring Autumn Reeser - takes place all over Venice, Italy.  They left the continent and went somewhere awesome.  You even see the library from Last Crusade.

Like... Lacey, you are an Executive Producer on these movies.  Maybe your character fell in love with someone in St. Barts or Paris?  But, sure... Boston/ Canada.  

I am aware this was likely filmed in the throws of COVID lockdown, which Italy reportedly did pretty well.  So maybe to get their film industry working, there were discounts?  And maybe during lockdown Chabert was not super mobile.

Anyway, art history professor Autumn Reeser takes the veil to Italy to research its history and provenance, and... that is 40% of what the movie is about.  Reeser meets maybe the most handsome dude I think I've seen in a Hallmark movie, whose family owns a famed lace shop and has the clues that start them down the path to solving the 130 year-old mystery.  

Autumn Reeser is one of the more cromulent Hallmark stars, and she's dressed to the nines in this, as is Man.  Like Chabert, she seems like a model for Colgate.  This is a feature, not a bug.

There's a subplot about Reeser helping out a promising student who is short on funds, and one in which she needs to win over her Italian students as she teaches them about American art - which all of the students seem positively disinterested in despite signing up for the class.  Man wants to expand the family business into the US before Reeser even shows up, and now he has a good reason to do so that is telegraphed just about as clumsily as it sounds.

Spoiler, I guess: The movie is both very horny and so chaste, it's confusing.  Reeser and Man are all over each other, making goo-goo eyes and almost panting.  He's not asking her for *anything*, no commitment, nada...  and all context clues suggest that, when we aren't seeing them, these two are up to shenanigans.  

But 3/4ths of the way through the movie, she declares "I think I might be developing feelings for him" - and, friends, I was absolutely gobsmacked.  She's spending all of her time with him, talking only to him, getting to know his family and they are, like, holding each other in some scenes.  And I know there's "we're just having fun shenanigans" but this is still Hallmark.  

Something got away from these two in what feels like a weirdly sexy (for Hallmark) bit of attraction that doesn't feel like a 7 year old playing with dolls imagining how people fall in love, as in most of these movies.

Unfortunately, the movie slows to a crawl.  We're being *told* about the mystery of the veil instead of seeing it.  We do not get flashbacks or anything, so it's just two people speculating about the veil.  And it feels like the movie slams into a wall at some point and doesn't recover until the last few minutes.

The story of the veil I think lands the movie as a PG-13 rating due to some chatter about illegitimate children.  Plus, in all of these movies, they're downing rosé like it's 10:30 during someone named Madison's birthday party.

It's fine.  If you want to (not that I would ever) let the movie run while you do other things on your computer, you can look up to see Venice from time to time.  It seems awesome.