FILMS ... with Tim Milfull
The Waiting City (M)
Director: Claire McCarthy
Stars: Radha Mitchell, Joel Edgerton, Samrat Chakrabarti
Rating: 3.5/5
108-minutes, now screening
Fans of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire will no doubt enjoy Aussie director Claire McCarthy’s latest feature film, The Waiting City, especially since it offers an impression of another Indian city in the context of a humanitarian story.
Fiona Simmons (Radha Mitchell) is a high-strung corporate lawyer recently landed in Calcutta to pick up her adopted daughter from the Sisters of Charity Mission. Her much more laidback husband, Ben (Joel Edgerton) seems to be tagging along for the ride, eager to taste the exotic local delights and strum his guitar along the way. But there are distressing undercurrents in the Simmons marriage, which are only strengthened by Fiona’s ties to her career and Ben’s apparent apathy. Writer-director McCarthy draws on her own experiences in Calcutta, where she has not only filmed documentaries and music videos, but also worked closely alongside the Sisters of Charity as a volunteer with her sister. An authentic sense of chaos reaches out from the screen, thanks to some impressively organised location shoots on the streets of the city, and according to McCarthy, the stress and exhilaration on the faces of both Mitchell and Edgerton during some of the crowd scenes was quite genuine. There are also moments of well-earned peace here, as Ben and Fiona come closer to meeting their child, and interact with the wider community of Calcutta, especially with their guide Krishna (Samrat Chakrabarti), who isn’t backwards in coming forwards when questioning their motives in taking one of his fellow Indians back to Australia. McCarthy succeeds in fleshing out the conflicting emotions and imperatives binding and tearing at the marriage, along with the complex internal forces propelling Ben and Fiona forward and holding them back. The Waiting City is a carefully considered window into the lives and emotions of these two wandering souls amid the simultaneously frightening and intoxicating backdrop of Calcutta.
Ensemble cast steal show from Welles
Me and Orson Welles (PG)
Director: Richard Linklater
Stars: Zac Efron, Eddie Marsan, Christian McKay
Rating: 3.5/5
114-minutes, now screening from 29 July
Richard Linklater has been a little quiet of late, with only a baseball documentary and the weirdness of A Scanner Darkly appearing on our radar since 2006.
Starring the baby-faced Zac Efron as the slightly too handsome everyman Richard, Me and Orson Welles tells the story of the make-or-break production of Shakespeare’s Caesar at New York’s Mercury Theatre in the 30s as its hapless proprietor John Houseman (Eddie Marsan) dangles helplessly at the mercy of the big man himself, Orson Welles.
Christian McKay – an accomplished musician and singer who studied at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music – successfully brings the larger-than-life performer to the screen, and showcases some of Welles’s legendary exploits, including his regular use of an ambulance to break through New York’s traffic jams.
Linklater based his film on the novel by Robert Kaplow, which in turn was inspired by a photo of Welles sitting on the edge of the stage during the production alongside a young man playing a dodgy lute fashioned from a ukulele; Me and Orson Welles tells the story of the same young man’s spectacularly brief encounter with the great actor. But McKay and Efron are almost outshone by the performances of their fellow ensemble cast members, as their characters zoom in and out of Welles’s orbit.
From Claire Danes’s charming but ambitious Sonja and Ben Chaplin’s deliciously neurotic George Coulouris/Marc Antony to Leo Bill’s archly self-deprecating Norman Lloyd/Cinna the Poet, there are some wonderful performances here. This delightful romp deserves not to be missed.
THE BINGE
A film festival in two fleeting parts
Arab Film Festival
Screening 30-31 July at Dendy Cinemas
Floating Weeds (MA15+)
Films of Luc Besson
All now available from Madman
In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it visit to Brisbane, the Arab Film Festival will stop in at the Dendy Portside cinemas at the end of July as part of its tour around Australia.
There are only two films screening on the Friday and Saturday nights, but both look fascinating. I saw the first – City of Life – last week, and really enjoyed the multi-layered story of different lives in Dubai, and the second film – Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story – looks quite provocative, with its theme of offering a public voice for women’s issues in contemporary Cairo. For more details, go online to www.arabfilmfestival.com.au
And on the DVD front, Madman continues to outdo itself in promoting the great cinema of the 20th Century. An addition to the already impressive suite of films on offer by Japanese master Yasujiro Ozo, Floating Weeds is a bittersweet, melancholic story of a Kabuki troupe stopping in to a small town, where hidden associations with the locals threaten to bubble to the surface.
From the great eastern masters to the blockbusting western masters, a series of French director, Luc Besson’s films will be released over the next month or so. There are early, little-known titles like the apocalyptic film, The Last Battle, and probably Christopher Lambert’s one great performance in Subway. And I think I may have recently mentioned Jean Reno in The Big Blue.
But there are also the action-packed assassin stories, Leon: The Professional (pictured below) and La Femme Nikita, and the flamboyant sci-fi epic helmed by Bruce Willis, The Fifth Element. Not quite something for everyone, but most should be comfortably satisfied.
