Juno-esque in Saffron

 It would seem that Australian director Claire McCarthy’s new film The Waiting City has caused a bit of trouble. Reviewers, both official and unofficial, have been sharply divided in their opinions, some praising its cinematography and moving story, but others denouncing it as a typical example of Australian film mediocrity, with unattractive characters dumped in a token and stereotyped Indian setting to render a bland tale more palatable.

My own opinion is that The Waiting City is a very good film—and I mean good in a moral sense, not just its aesthetic. It is visually beautiful; McCarthy makes full use of the vivid palette of colours, sights (and smells) of Calcutta. But it’s more than that, and it’s clearly disturbed some viewers and made them uncomfortable in ways that they are perhaps not really prepared to acknowledge.

I think it is a mistake to see this as just a story about an Australian couple (played by Radha Mitchell and Joel Edgerton) who want to adopt an Indian baby. If you do, then you will certainly see the central characters as two-dimensional and the story contrived, and you will be bitterly disappointed. It’s not a documentary; it’s a morality play and a parable, and its characters are caught up in a drama which extends well beyond them and their petty, pampered and irritable lives. In fact, the drama into which the facile and foolish Fiona and Ben stumble is one which is genuinely transcendental.

Most films—indeed, most stories from Genesis onwards—are built around a man, a woman, and a crisis. This film is partly about Ben and Fiona’s growing understanding that there are forces around them that they do not understand, and that they cannot control. In short, we are brought face to face with the least popular element in modern film today, and that is the G-word. But before you switch off completely, the G-word is developed in this film mostly through the vehicle of Hinduism. This is a very shrewd move of McCarthy’s, who clearly understands that while her audience will swallow practically anything with multiple arms and a dot on its forehead, trying to use Christian imagery will cause immediate alienation and grinding of teeth.

Fiona, a control-freak successful lawyer (is there any other kind?) and her depressive, medicated, former in-patient, ex-successful-musician husband Ben (ditto), are off to India to adopt a little girl, Lakshmi. On the way, they face a great many upsets and disasters along the general lines of West-meets-East. These are largely smoothed out by Krishna (Samrat Chakrabarti), the preternaturally helpful and good-natured hotel factotum, who suffers under the tyranny of his hotel-owning uncle.

Either they are not told by the adoption agency that their little girl is chronically unwell, or they are very forgiving when they find this out, because Lakshmi is very unwell indeed. In the process of facing this, Fiona and Ben also have to deal with some potentially destructive truths about their marriage, and their ideas about each other.

It may seem an odd comparison, but there are resonances between The Waiting City and Jason Reitman’s 2007 quirky success story Juno. Both films are about motherhood, but motherhood expressed in ways which we have largely forgotten in the West. Juno also featured a sharply-drawn childless married couple, Mark and Vanessa, who are not dissimilar to Ben and Fiona: a female meticulous control freak, and an immature, music-loving male daydreamer. It’s tempting to wonder why people like this marry each other, but opposites attract, and art imitates life; films about the wars of the sexes have not really progressed much, except in terms of where we move the battle lines.

Juno is a film about maturity, and about how to make an authentic choice when faced with an unplanned pregnancy—rather than the spurious choice of either an abortion or your-life-will-be-ruined-forever, with ample pressure applied by parents, partners, clinicians and employers to choose Option A. In the same way, The Waiting City is about maturity, and about fighting: it reminds us that maturity and motherhood are achievements which come at the end of many battles. We have perhaps wrapped up maternity too much in tissue advertisements and elective caesareans, forgetting that a mother fights for the life of her child: she fights her own body’s morning sickness, migraines and high blood pressure, she fights through labour, and then she has to fight her child’s battles until they are old enough to fight them for themselves.

True mothers are warriors; they are also cosmic forces in their own right, and they don’t go away. Fiona encounters a blind mystic who “sees” her dead mother standing next to her; Ben sees animals everywhere with their own little one next to them. At the orphanage, Missionary of Charity Sister Tessila (Tillotama Shome) has to explain to Ben and Fiona that she has nursed little Lakshmi since she was born, so that she, too, is her mother. In fact, the one person who remains hidden throughout is Lakshmi’s birth mother. When Fiona, in her intrusive way, tries to worm it out of a (rather elderly-looking) novice at the orphanage, the nun reacts angrily. I suppose if you were an Agnes of God type, you might suspect she was her mother, but I don’t think that’s the intention here. Certainly there’s no whispering afterwards by the women together—they simply (and rightly) dismiss her as a nosy white woman. Nor is there any implication that Krishna’s interest in taking them to Lakshmi’s village is connected with him being her father.

But there is really no mystery about Lakshmi: she has been abandoned because she is female and sickly. The recent film Riwayat (2010) has managed to use Bollywood to explore the appalling femicide of which “Mother India” is guilty; a sick and poor female child is the bottom of the pecking order and a burden to all around her. The only reason Lakshmi is still alive at all is because of spiritual mothers like the Missionaries of Charity, who have given her a home and their love and care.

Motherhood is not about ownership, as Fiona clearly thinks it is: she wants a child as a focus of love, but also an accessory. Early in the film, Fiona and Ben record camcorder messages to Lakshmi for when she is older. Fiona tells her with a perfectly straight face that she wants to become “whatever you want me to be”, but the extent of her lack of self-knowledge is revealed by deliberately juxtaposing this declaration with scenes of Fiona’s control-freakery and high-powered career. Fiona’s desperation to know everything about Lakshmi’s own culture so that she can pass this on to her is also shown to be fruitless and foolish: she cannot and does not have the cultural competence, and all this would really pass on to Lakshmi is Fiona’s own desperate desire to fit in.

And who—and where—is Ben in all this? Motherhood is potent and mysterious; yet fatherhood has always been perhaps too obvious in its physical process, most notably the (comparatively speaking) transient nature of their involvement in conception. Ben is very much a lesser mortal; he is wounded and weak, more quickly affected by food poisoning and tiredness. Initially, he is not an endearing character, and again I wonder if those who have dismissed him as unbelievable are actually rejecting some reflection of themselves: men like Ben usually think themselves far more fun to be with than they actually are.

Early in the film, Ben appears to be the more “spiritual” of the two, with his little home-made shrine of figurines and his toy rabbit. Yet it is a shallow and childish and largely self-made spirituality, and like all home-made spiritualities it is ultimately unsatisfying. He too grows in stature as his character develops in small ways: he is willing to express his own long-lapsed Catholic faith when he visits the orphanage chapel, he begins to accept more responsibility, and finally asks his wife to “marry” him all over again. He also puts away his toys and starts to turn his music to better uses—to the wooing and winning of his estranged wife.

I am no expert, but I think it’s helpful to have a little bit of working knowledge about the Hindu deities involved in this film. The benevolent and cheerful Hindu deity Krishna was a fostered child (who actually overthrew and killed his own tyrannical uncle—a nice touch by McCarthy there). It is Krishna the character who takes Ben and Fiona to Lakshmi’s home village, and asks them awkward questions about their journey and their motives; who tries to patch up their failing marriage; and who finally presides over their reunion at his cousin’s wedding. The god Krishna’s wives are believed to be all incarnations of the goddess Lakshmi, and Lakshmi herself is the goddess of good luck, fertility, courage and wealth. More specifically, she is the embodiment of love, especially love of God, and it is through Lakshmi that the soul can actually attain God.

Yet McCarthy has chosen Hindu symbols that feed so neatly into established Christian, and most noticeably Catholic symbols, that it’s hard not to get suspicious. There is a very great deal to do with water and washing in this film, both purgative (in the case of Ben’s poisoning) and purifying (Scarlett’s shower, Fiona’s plunge into the Ganges). A temptation comes snaking across Ben’s path straight out of Genesis: his old acquaintance Scarlett—free-spirited, promiscuous, young, gorgeous, hippyish, druggy, musical. Ben takes one of his first steps to maturity when he sees Scarlett out in a courtyard; he smiles back, but then firmly closes the window. When Ben prays in the orphanage chapel, it is to Mary the Mother of God that the nuns are singing—although McCarthy does not show any statues or images of her.

In the streets of Calcutta, Fiona encounters worshippers of Durga, the supreme mother goddess who represents the warrior aspect of motherhood. Durga means “fortress”, and Durga is the goddess who both protects her devotees from harm and takes away their unhappiness. Durga’s iconography includes a lion for courage, a sharp-edged sword for knowledge, and a thunderbolt for action. It is one of Durga’s gifts to be able to produce in her worshippers the proper environment for righteousness to grow.

All of this proves critical to Fiona’s—and thus Ben’s—growth in the film. Krishna urges her to take part in a simple ceremony by the Ganges at sunset, practised by what he cheerfully calls “barren women”: all she has to do is touch the water before the sun sets to receive a blessing from Durga. Fiona protests that she doesn’t believe in God, or gods, or anything of the sort. Krishna gently responds: if this is the case, then what’s the harm in it?

Fiona has clearly never heard of Pascal’s Wager; in fact it’s questionable as to whether Fiona’s heard of anything outside of her work or her very narrow circle of colleagues. Fiona’s character may be a stereotype, but there is a reason why stereotypes exist. Fiona may well “not believe in God” (although clearly her mother did), but she has never thought about why she does not believe in God. She does not believe in God for precisely the same reasons that she buys expensive shoes; it is because it is what everybody else does, and Fiona wants above all to fit in. Her character can be multiplied by the millions in Australia today, and it also makes me wonder if, as with Ben, those who took exception to her are those who found themselves looking in a mirror and seeing someone they didn’t like.

Fiona, mostly to show off, literally takes the plunge: instead of just touching the water, she fully immerses herself, and it is under the water that the most powerful change in her worldview begins. Later that day, she and Ben make love, apparently for the first time in ages, because he has not been in the mood and the antidepressants slow him down. Afterwards, she tells him about something that happened some years earlier in their marriage—when her career was just starting to take off, and he had recently been discharged from a psychiatric hospital where he had been treated for major depression.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to work out what she’s done. Fiona opens by telling Ben how, when she was under the water, she remembered how hard it would be to have another baby. Ben’s reaction to the news that she had decided to abort their first child without telling him is everything that you would expect: he is deeply and gravely wounded, not just because of the unknown baby but because of her decision not to ask him, or tell him.

The Waiting City, like Juno, reminds us of the need to face and accept the consequences of certain life choices. It is not a film about punishing women for having an abortion; rather, it shows that the decision to have an abortion does not just concern one woman’s body, but actually concerns the baby’s father, the woman’s future fertility, and—although they may not credit it—the entire universe. When Lakshmi dies—as die she must—Krishna tells Fiona that a mother is a mother forever, even in death; that she is now truly a mother. The irony is, of course, that the “barren woman” Fiona has been a mother throughout the film, but a mother “even in death”: she has been pregnant before, but has aborted the child.

Yet it is a hopeful film. A continuing theme in the film is the loss and then finding of the other: Fiona and Ben are constantly being separated from each other in crowds and exposed to danger; abandoning each other in anger, and yet always brought back together again. When they finally make love, you can’t help but hope that this is the moment when a new baby begins its life. Their reunion at Krishna’s cousin’s wedding is full of optimism, and it is hard not to believe that Fiona is already carrying a child in her own interior “waiting city”: that her prayers have been answered. And if that is all Fiona remembers from her trip to India—that there is a God, and that prayers are always answered, but not always in the way you expect—then she will have brought back with her a very great deal indeed.

Dr Philippa Martyr is a historian who is also a regular movie review contributor to QED, the Quadrant online blog. A shorter version of this review appeared on QED on August 6.