Casamento Australiano

I saw the premiere of this file at Sundance, and it's a great film. It follows a lot of the traditional Rom-Com formula, but does it very well-the right mix of funny & touching, but never getting sappy. It uses a "road trip" plot device, that allows for some spectacular cinematography of Austraila's Northern Territories and islands. The music in the film is outstanding! (I hope the soundtrack gets released...) A really fun, well-done movie, and if it gets picked up for distribution in the US I think will perform well here. This was easily one of my favorite films so far at Sundance this year!

Miranda Tapsell leads us on a merry dance through all of the Northern Territory's most famous and scenic sights, from Nitmilik Gorge to Kakadu to the Tiwi Islands. There are credits to the Northern Territory Tourist Bureau, and they more than got their money's worth.

The story line is a bit predictable, but it is told with enthusiastic good nature and has a couple of less obvious twists that overall it hung together well enough that I didn't mind. It is the Miranda show and she inhabits the character so easily I wonder whether aspects of it might be slightly autobiographical. Gwilym Lee as fiancé Ned is a pleasant, slightly uncomfortable fish out of water in what to him must be such a strange environment. The extras, Aboriginal people in various places and particularly on the Tiwi Islands, give it a goodly dollop of authenticity and provides a reflective backdrop for many of the story's aspects.

In some ways, it's a bit like a visual equivalent of a musical - a not terribly plausible or important story that ties together not songs but images and impressions of Australia's Top End and the people that live there. If you've never been, this might just inspire you to go.

This isn't a terrible romantic comedy. I am certainly not the target demographic, and though I've given this film a 2.5/5 star rating, I think it's a film that people like my mom would like. There are movies out there that work much better for some people than they do for others, and the schmaltzy, cheesy romance stuff doesn't always work for me unless the characters are ones that I actually care about. In this film, I thought the characters were likeable, but I didn't care about them. The humor also felt a touch one note. The dad crying in the closet was a gag that was used repeatedly; at first it grew funnier with every time, but then the gag kept getting used, and it went beyond the realm of funny and into the realm of annoying. By the fifth or sixth time the gag was used, I wondered how many more times I would have to hear that bloody song before the credits rolled.

Why does this earn a special space in my heart? It is a romantic comedy after all, deliberately designed to be discarded. The genre is defined by the attractiveness of a superficial love; the easy way problems are resolved and the balance of designed soulmates restored.

This film follows the mandated pattern: love, some misunderstanding of clumsiness that separates the lovers, a public pronouncement of love with cheering bystanders, happy ending - often a wedding and dancing. You have to have some strong comedic, but identifiably human characters. This serves that pattern well.

But it also has a few important differences. The first is the in your face charm of the land. I am immigrating to Australia so this grabs me deeper than it will you, dear reader. But it will likely grab you too, because the rom-com device here is place-as-heart. That is usually impossible to convey cinematically: vistas are containers, situations within which you place the characters and their emotions. Even Takashi Miike's 'The Bird People in China' or the obverse film, Zhang Yimou's obverse 'Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles' can only use place as space, and then only to annotate, even when they use the mystery of place and people.

Here you have a device no other place has: the people and the place share an identity. I don't know how well this would be conveyed to someone who knows nothing of the Aborigines, but the movie completely captures the notion by bringing souls to a physical place in the context of life commitment. The driver of 'place' as an agent is largely implied, making it so much stronger.

But there's also a more intriguing notion of love than usual. As with the standard rom-com model, it is the man that is the lead and the woman that acquiesces or not. But here the guy has some novel metaphors. Here he is already committed beyond the happy closeness of an early relationship and he explains why: his life is a room half filled with boxes that mean ('contain') little and he wants the rest to be full of flowers and jewels. This is after the metaphor is set up by someone in the parallel romance. And it becomes a complaint in the big breakup scene.

But the metaphor is strange enough that it steps out of the rom-com genre far enough to register as human; love for someone coming as much from the pull of attraction (and this woman is attractive) as from the innate need for companionship.

This movie put a smile on my face. The characters are just the greatest bunch of lovable people (and a dog) brought together in a movie. The story, despite some familiar scenarios, was fresh and interesting. Some beautiful cinematography of the Katherine gorge and Tiwi Islands and elsewhere up north added some more interest to the movie and should have people adding the north to their "bucket lists". Some truly funny scenes. I thought Kerry Fox was particularly funny in her role as Miranda Tapsell's lawyer boss, she seemed to be having the time of her life playing the part. It could have been pure caricature, but she gave it some depth. The camera just loves Miranda Tapsell and Ursula Yovich, who plays her mum, and the actors who played the bridesmaids were similarly gorgeous. Huw Higginson was good as the dad, and he managed to nail an aussie accent, which not many pull off. The movie reminded me of that REM/B52s song "shiny happy people". Yes, there is some pathos, but overall it was just shiny happy people in a beautiful shiny happy landscape (yes, I know you can get eaten by crocs and die of heatstroke, but in the movie it was all just gorgeous) and I came out of the film having a bit of the shiny happy rubbed off onto me. I agree with the other reviewer about the soundtrack. I also liked it a lot.