Religious and moral worlds clash in a visual feast.

The Waiting City is about an Australian couple, played by Radha Mitchell and Joel Edgerton, who go to India to adopt a child. Once in Kolkata, the adoption agency puts them on hold, hence the title, but there’s another idea. Fiona (Mitchell) has waited to have a child while she pursues a legal career. Though the reason for adoption is not quite clear, the inference is that they are paying a price for her ambition. Fiona gets a thorough going-over here as a modern woman, part of the film’s overall prosecution of arrogant Western values.

This is the second feature of Claire McCarthy, after Cross Life (2007). She knows something about the adoption business. She and her sister, Helena, volunteered with Mother Teresa’s nuns in 2002, where she met many Western couples waiting to adopt. McCarthy’s documentary, Sisters in Calcutta, aired on the ABC in 2008. The Waiting City opens out from these experiences into an ambitious and confronting film with spiritual as well as political overtones.
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It is said to be the first Australian feature shot entirely in India and that gives a sense of immersion – quite literally in a couple of scenes to do with the Ganges. It would be hard to avoid confrontations of many kinds while shooting in India but it’s another thing to catch them on film. McCarthy does that well: she shoots on the streets, at food stalls, within the lively shops of Kolkata, in tiny alleys where bewildering crowds come and go in seconds bearing religious statues on parade. Many films by Westerners tend to do places like Kolkata from high vantage points, possibly to avoid creating more chaos with cameras on the streets, but this one embraces the chaos, at least when the couple venture out of their five-star hotel.

Ben is all for exploring while they wait. He’s a musician, so he brings his guitar out, teaching street kids to strum. Fiona is more closed and wary, more workaholic. She Skypes her office and tries to prod the Indian bureaucracy into action. It’s her first trip to the subcontinent, obviously. Ben is frustrated by her insistence on control. As their relations sour, we realise that she’s the breadwinner, he’s the arty dreamer, and they’re used to getting what they want. Waiting is not their forte. When a pretty young acquaintance wafts back into view – an Australian girl on the backpacker route (Isabel Lucas) – Ben is distracted by her hippie charms, putting further strain on the relationship.

McCarthy’s script takes immense risks, not all of which come off. One of the issues she explores is the couple’s lack of religious belief, an idea that perplexes the Indians they meet. A new hotel employee, Krishna (Samrat Chakrabarti), becomes both servant and interrogator. ”Motherhood,” he tells them, ”is a gift from God.” The child they are waiting to meet, little Lakshmi, ”is a child of Mother India”. Krishna is concerned that they intend to remove a child from India into a non-religious home.

While McCarthy explores these cultural differences, the film maintains its realism, but she pushes it further. A blind street vendor ”sees” the ghost of Fiona’s mother standing beside her, something Fiona admits to feeling. Hindu gods and (especially) goddesses press in on them to challenge their Western certainty but this spiritualism unsettles the story. Are we to take the inference literally – that Fiona must somehow purify herself before she can have the child? What is her sin, that she chose career over reproduction? It’s an interesting argument to pit feminism against fertility and religion but impossible to resolve.

Mitchell does a lot here with a difficult role. Fiona is sometimes hard to like but Mitchell builds from a tiny nub of vulnerability to create a complex, engaging character. Edgerton’s character has more warmth and less substance, in the sense of being not quite grown up. Like a lot of men, Ben has gone a long way on charm. The combination gives us a convincing and unusually perceptive portrait of a relationship in crisis, which is perhaps what the film meant to do. On this point, it’s a satisfying and perceptive drama.

I found the spiritualism less convincing, a touch arbitrary. A lot of Western films about India reach for the pantheon of Hindu gods at some point, without penetrating deeply into the mindset of the people who follow them. I think McCarthy tries to do that with the hotel man, Krishna, but he’s not quite a complete character. Lucas’s character is barely there, which contributes to a sense that the foundations of the film are underdeveloped. The film does the big thing very well – the portrait of a mature relationship in trouble – but stumbles trying to do more.

Reviewer rating: 3 1/2 stars out of 5
Reader rating: 4 1/2 stars out of 5

– smh.com.au

Mature eye on adoption

WHEN we look back in a few years, I wonder if the past 24 months will be seen as the start of a golden period for Australian cinema.

I raise the question while not yet being certain of the answer. What I’ll say for certain is that the release of films as strong as Samson and Delilah, The Square, Balibo, The Last Ride, Beneath Hill 60, The Black Balloon, Animal Kingdom and The Boys are Back within a relatively short time frame has made it hard for any informed cinema-lover to argue that Australian filmmaking is still in the doldrums.

It’s true that, for a while, local filmmakers were producing too many middle-of-the-road family dramas and coming-of-age stories, excessively tasteful art films where most of the art had been surgically removed.

But local filmmakers are at last working in a wider variety of styles and genres and the energy of a new wave of younger filmmaking talent is making itself felt. We still produce a few failures, but no national film industry has ever had a 100 per cent strike rate and right now our cinematic glass is looking more full than empty.

With The Waiting City, the story of a young Australian couple who travel to Calcutta to finalise the adoption of an Indian baby, Sydney-based writer-director Claire McCarthy joins this new creative surge, showing a level of maturity that makes it hard to credit that she’s still only in her 20s.

Fiona, played by Radha Mitchell, is a super-efficient lawyer who seems a little more uptight than strictly necessary when she arrives in Calcutta with her partner Ben (Joel Edgerton) and discovers some of her baggage is missing. Ben is a musician who seems happy to take a back seat, trying to keep everything chilled until they start finalising the adoption procedure. This turns out to be as labyrinthine as the city’s over-crowded streets and alleyways.

Initially, all we learn about their decision to adopt comes from offhand comments to their endearingly eccentric hotel driver and porter, Krishna (Samrat Chakrabarti), whose cultural assumptions and values are often dramatically at odds with theirs.

The appearance of an old flame of Ben’s in the shape of Scarlett (Isabel Lucas), a dippy but beautiful hippie singer, ratchets up the pressure until the certainties with which they arrived slowly begin to unravel like that huge ball of string in the Melbourne tourism commercials.

Getting from here to the end of the adoption process will be a more challenging journey than either of them bargained for.

That this is the first Australian feature to be set entirely in India can’t help but give it certain freshness. One of its many pleasures is the vivid way in which McCarthy and her crew (including first-rate cinematographer Denson Baker) capture the city’s vibrant oversupply of new sounds and stimuli in scenes that hold up well compared to those in the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire.

But the film is more than just a travelogue, taking its audience on an emotional rollercoaster that never stops until the very end. McCarthy deserves much credit not only for her remarkably assured direction but also her artfully layered script.

After viewing the film I was hardly surprised to learn that a few years ago McCarthy spent time in India making a documentary about her sister’s work on projects involving slum children.

She also had met Western couples who were trying to adopt Indian children, while she was there and later in Australia, as part of her background research for this screenplay.

With that depth of immersion, by the time she made the film McCarthy had a real understanding of the topic, not only from a factual but also an emotional perspective. Her knowledge of India meant, for example, that she was able to create an often amusing Indian character (Krishna) without being patronising. We start to see that his view, far from eccentric, has a logic to it, so that from his perspective Ben and Fiona are the strange ones.

With excellent performances by its two leads, The Waiting City is McCarthy’s second feature. Her first, Cross Life, was a low-budget look at the red-light district of Sydney’s Kings Cross that had festival exposure but no commercial cinema release. This follow-up is a major step forward not just in budget but also in craft and sophistication. It marks its writer-director as a serious new talent whose career is going to be worth watching. It screened out of competition at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, but had it competed I suspect it would have had a serious chance of winning the top prize.

4 1/2 stars

– theaustralian.com.au