Rated: M
Directed by: Wayne Blair
Written by: Joshua Tyler and Miranda Tapsell
Based on a Concept by: Miranda Tapsell, Joshua Tyler and Glen Condie
Produced by: Rosemary Blight, Kylie du Fresne, Kate Croser
Starring: Miranda Tapsell, Gwilym Lee, Kerry Fox and Huw Higginson.
I feel like I’m glowing after watching Top End Wedding – a blushing bride?! No, but when director Wayne Blair introduced the film he, said, ‘This is good energy.’
And I’ve got to say, I feel it.
Top End Wedding is a warm-hearted, funny movie about Lauren (Miranda Tapsell) who’s just made Associate at her law firm in Adelaide and Ned (Gwilym Lee), also a lawyer, but quits his job when he decides it’s wrong to indict a woman for stealing incontinence pads. And then offers her a tissue as she cries on the stand. Not for her incontinence but for her tears.
When Ned proposes, Lauren whole-heartedly says yes.
With only eleven days leave given by her ball-breaking, super-organised boss, Hampton (Kerry Fox), Lauren decides she wants to get married in Darwin. Her home town. Where her parents still live.
When Ned and Lauren arrive, they find:
Mum (Daffy, played by Ursula Yovich) has gone missing, leaving;
Dad (Trevor, played by Huw Higginson) a wreck and crying and hiding in the pantry, listening to music where eventually he says, ‘I can’t listen to anymore 80s chick music.’
Ned and Lauren’s relationship gets tested as the pressure of the wedding and family weighs on their shoulders. Yet, in the end. It’s all about coming home.
I didn’t expect to enjoy this film as much as I did. And writer and lead Miranda Tapsell had a lot to do with the warmth and beauty of this story.
Producer, Rosemary Blight tells of Miranda wanting to do a romantic comedy: ‘I thought there’d be a whole lot more after The Sapphires and there’d be these feisty, funny Aboriginal screenplays. It didn’t happen. So I wrote it myself.’
There’s a great partnership here, between Miranda and director, Wayne Blair, both previous collaborators on the highly successful, The Sapphires (2012). All the parts work so well.
Top End Wedding feels like a down-to-earth film but there’s a lot of sophistication going here with the timing and segue of scenes and details like all the many different tribes of Aboriginals shown on a map of Australia as the couple travel across the country.
There’s beautiful scenery shot from: Darwin to Kakadu National Park, Katherine, Nitmiluk National Park also including the people of the Tiwi Islands dancing and singing, welcoming the audience into their world, onto their land.
And the soundtrack invites you in, the score from Antony Partos using the ukulele, mandolin and acoustic guitar, and pitched down acoustic guitar so it feels like you’ve been invited to sit around a camp fire.
But it’s the humour that got me – where a lump of sugar is dropped in a cup of tea despite the indecisiveness of an Englishman: do I or don’t I want that lump of sugar? Drop.
The bumbling Brit does OK: there’s nothing wrong with his ‘gum nuts’.
One of my favourite scenes is the golden light held in the air of a white wooden hall, ceiling fans slowly rotating high overhead as an 80s love song plays by a boy she hasn’t met, yet…
See, GLOWING.
What a gorgeous film. Loved it.