“Calcutta changed

A debut feature film reveals the innermost emotions of its protagonists against a changing setting

BY SHIVANGI AMBANI-GANDHI

“You’d never survive a day in the slums of Calcutta.” This rather random taunt from their mother sent Sydney director Claire McCarthy and her younger sister to the streets of Calcutta in 2003. And it was here that the first ideas for her debut feature film, The Waiting City, germinated.

The city is not only the primary location of the film – making it the first Aussie feature shot entirely in India – but also plays a major role driving and transforming the lives of the two protagonists. An Australian couple, Ben (Joel Edgerton) and Fiona (Radha Mitchell), arrive in Calcutta to collect their adopted baby. Delays with the adoption agency mean that they must wait there for days and succumb to the chaos and magic of the city which drives them to confront deeply buried differences as well as their core beliefs.

The ways in which the city transforms the couple is quite close to McCarthy’s own experience. “Calcutta opened my eyes to a lot of things, partially also because of the volunteer work we did with Mother Teresa’s sisters,” she recollects. “That experience cracks you open. You meet people you would never otherwise meet and see things you would never otherwise see. Calcutta changed my world.”

During that first visit, McCarthy made a documentary film about her and her sister’s experience with the Missionaries of Charity sisters and the way in which the experience transformed them. “There were so many contradictions in the work we were doing. There was always a great paradox – with great sadness and poverty, there was also great beauty. We saw life and death so openly,”

Delays with the adoption agency mean that they must wait there for days and succumb to the chaos and magic of the city which drives them to confront deeply buried differences as well as their core beliefs she says.

During this time, McCarthy also became privy to the highly emotional process of adoption and started interviewing couples who had adopted children. “I started to collate those interviews and find threads in those stories. This film is an intersection between truth and fiction,” she reveals. To maintain what McCarthy calls the “poetic realism” of the film, she used many non-actors as well as real locations. The film starts off in the generic looking airport and a five star hotel. However, as Fiona and Ben travel around the city and to its rural outskirts to understand the place from which Lakshmi, their adopted daughter hails, the drama and chaos of the city unfolds. “Claire is just so ballsy to even have the idea to come to Calcutta and shoot in the train station, and shoot in the street, take over the airport,” Radha Mitchell says in an interview for the production notes. In McCarthy’s hands, Calcutta is no mere exotic locale to tell an emotional tale on overdrive mode.