Diane and I watched this moving, intelligent and subtle film this afternoon in Fremantle and both of us had nearly the same feelings about what we had just seen. I believe Waiting City was one of the few, if not the only, film made completely out of Australia; the visuals of the city of Kolcata (Calcutta) are stunning and are a significant aspect of the movie that we saw. Without going into details of the script, I thought that an important part of the film was the subtle breaks in information given the viewer through the progression of the film; as viewers we are not fed every bit of information about the plot of the film. There are certain characters and certain incidents that either end with no reference to them any more in the script or certain characters that appear and then are gone with no further reference to them ever having been there in the first place. This is not to say that, at least for me, this aspect of the filming is disturbing or somehow negative, it is just curious and for me adds to the subtle mysteriousness of the film.
India plays a central role in the film; its population and crowding are almost suffocating and the obvious run-down vision of the city where the action takes place is striking for someone living in a Western city where everything is quickly repaired as soon as paint fades or tiles crack.
On the political side of the film, it can be no accident that the central drama of the movie revolves around the city of Bhopal where the world's worst industrial accident occurred in 1984 in a plant owned and operated by the American company Union Carbide. As the script develops, the viewer will see the logic of the inclusion of that tragic city in the film. There is not the slightest mention of what happened there in '84 but the chemical nature of that disaster leads inexorably to conclusions by the viewer.
India plays a central role in the film; its population and crowding are almost suffocating and the obvious run-down vision of the city where the action takes place is striking for someone living in a Western city where everything is quickly repaired as soon as paint fades or tiles crack.
On the political side of the film, it can be no accident that the central drama of the movie revolves around the city of Bhopal where the world's worst industrial accident occurred in 1984 in a plant owned and operated by the American company Union Carbide. As the script develops, the viewer will see the logic of the inclusion of that tragic city in the film. There is not the slightest mention of what happened there in '84 but the chemical nature of that disaster leads inexorably to conclusions by the viewer.