Top End Wedding

'Top End Wedding' is from the director of 'The Sapphires' and also stars Tapsell, this time as Lauren, an up-&-coming lawyer from Adelaide. She gets engaged to Ned (Lee), which sets in motion a whirlwind trip to Darwin to try and pull together a wedding in 10 days before she's required back at work, thanks to her demanding boss Ms Hampton (Fox).

Back in Darwin, we meet Lauren's Dad, Trevor (Higginson) and the twist that her Mum, Daphne (Yovich), has left to find her roots. This "mystery" forces Lauren and Ned on a roadtrip to find her, and allows us to see the spectacular scenery in Kakadu and Katherine, as well as eventually, the Tiwi Islands. There's plenty of funny moments along the way and interesting characters.

As well as the great settings, there's also some emotional reunions for Lauren and Daphne with their people and country on the Tiwi Islands - it's all handled really well and is very touching. It's fantastic to see Aboriginal actors and Australian settings on film - I wish there was more. Overall, a lovely film in terms of story, music, characters and settings.

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.

10 points for being female-written, having a largely Indigenous cast, and showcasing some beautiful parts of Australia. Unfortunately I felt the story was a bit disjointed and some of the jokes fell flat. It was an enjoyable enough movie to see on Mother's Day and Miranda Tapsell is an absolute star, but this one didn't do it for me.

This film was even better than I'd hoped for, and I smiled through much of the movie - and left feeling great! A truly uplifting romcom showcasing some unique parts of Australia that I now really want to explore! Excellent soundtrack. Definitely go and see it!

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.