Release Date: July 15, 2010

Length: 108 minutes

Classification: M (Mature themes and coarse language)

The Australian film industry is looking bright, with this first all-Australian feature film to be filmed entirely overseas, written and directed by up-and-coming talent, Claire McCarthy.  Filmed entirely on location in Calcutta, India, The Waiting City aims to dispel the myths about Hollywood celebrity adoptions, giving the issue a realistic and uniquely Australian perspective. 

Radha Mitchell (Finding Neverland, Pitchblack) and Joel Edgerton (Star Wars: Episode II & III) play Fiona and Ben, an assumingly happy and outgoing couple who travel to India to collected their adopted daughter, and adoption that has been in the process for many months.  Highly strung, workaholic, The couple seem to complement each other perfectly, but when the adoption process is held up and they find they are stuck in India, the cracks in their relationship begin to appear.

Former Home and Away prop Isabel Lucas is thrown into the mix, along with the other cliched dramas that inevitably come with travelling, such as lost suitcases, rowdy backpackers, persistent conference calls from work, and the always humorous language barrier. It’s entertaining, but drawn out. The characters were already well established. We’ve all travelled, we’ve all been in relationships, we understand the issues involved and we don’t need an extended explanation in what is already a relatively short movie dealing with an issue that already has so much content to be covered. 

However, once the red tape is lifted and the 30-somethings can finally begin their quest to visit Lakshmi (their newly adopted daughter) the actual story begins. It brings out both the best and the worst of Fi and Ben’s relationship, but combined with the exotic and spiritual nature of where they are travelling, it brings out their true personas. 

Be warned, by no means is this a ‘feel good’ movie. What makes is so fascinating is that it doesn’t have a necessarily happy ending, but it is realistic, brutal and honest. It deals with overseas adoption in a way that we are not used to, unlike our real-life Hollywood counterparts, and for the first time really made me consider the moral and ethical issues involved in adoption. Before seeing this movie I thought that if an upper-middle class couple couldn’t have children but could afford to adopt one, why shouldn’t they be allowed? Surely that child would have a better life in a first-world country than a third-world one? I know it’s only a movie, but these kids in the orphanage looked like they were having a ball. They were one big family who got to learn together, eat together and play together, until gradually most of them were whisked off by a foreigner, supposedly for a better life away from everyone that they knew. Do these foreigners really have a right to buy a child, just like they’re a possession they don’t have but desperately want?

Unfortunately, the film neglected to outline the prospects the children might have once they leave the orphanage. It's all well and good to portray the children as having the time of their lives, but would the film-makers leave their children there? Or would they think their children had the chance of a better life in Australia regardless of the short term problems?

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, from the entertainment perspective, and from the way that it made me leave the cinema thiking about the issues it raised. Yes, it was slow to start, the way it was structured was a bit clichéd but Mitchell and Edgerton were superb.  I look forward to seeing what this team comes up with next. 

Distinction.   

Laura Macintosh.