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.

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