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Crowd Pleaser

Hollywood comedy the Five-Year Engagement opened New York’s Tribeca Film Festival on Wednesday bringing some crowd-pleasing laughs and red carpet glamour to the event before audiences settle into 12 days of mostly independent cinema.

The romance starring Jason Segel and Emily Blunt, made by the same team behind hit Forgetting Sarah Marshall, kicked off the festival which is entering its second decade with organisers promising a broad group of films from all regions of the world.

Segel and Blunt hit the red carpet for the movie in which they portray a couple discovering each other during a never-ending engagement. The film is directed by Nicholas Stoller, who co-wrote the script with Segel. The pair first teamed up with on the 2008 blockbuster Marshall.

“This is how inertia can destroy a relationship,” Stoller said. “They realise that they didn’t know each other quite as well as they thought. It’s about how an engagement can get in the way of a relationship.”

Compared to Marshall, the characters are slightly older and the male and female perspectives on love and relationships were equally represented, said Stoller. But his new film offers the same honesty as Marshall and Get Him to the Greek, which he also co-wrote with Segel.

“We like things to be awkward and real like they are in real life. People don’t often come out with the perfect phrase to explain a moment,” he said. “That kind of awkwardness and reality makes for the best comedy because people can see themselves in the characters.”

On the red carpet, Segel described the movie as “a lean mean comedy machine,” and joked that, like his previous comedies, there were again plenty of scenes of himself nude in strange situations. “Sadly there is, yes,” he said.

Blunt said another film in which she stars here at Tribeca, Your Sister’s Sister, is far different from the comedy opposite Segel, whom she described as a “good pal.”

“This is a big raucous comedy and the other one is a tiny movie all improvised, made for no money. We shot it in 12 days - there are very diverse, which is a good thing,” she said.

The film’s producer Judd Apatow, actress Olivia Wilde, comic actresses Amy Poehler and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, documentary maker Michael Moore, as well as the festival’s co-founder Robert De Niro also attended the opening, held near Central Park.