Top End Wedding
An unabashed romantic comedy, Top End Wedding is at times amusing, moving, trite and memorable. Its difference from mainstream rom-coms with its connection to first nation culture. Actress and co-writer Miranda Tapsell (with Joshua Tyler) and director Wayne Blair are aboriginal, they worked together on The Sapphires, and together give this movie a distinctively Australian approach.
Tapsell is from Kakadu, but for the purposes of the movie has relocated her country to the Tiwi Islands. As Lauren, she is determined to locate her mother after her partner, Ned (Gwliym Lee) proposes marriage. Lauren has 10 days to organise the wedding, but after she and her fiancée arrive in Darwin, expected confusion and mischief ensue. Her mother has vanished and her father is wandering around in pyjamas. When Lauren decides she can’t wed without her mother’s presence, she and Ned embark on a road trip across the top end, with all of the beauty and disasters such a cinematic journey entails.
It’s a mild clash of cultures, as a tame movie, much of which is a fairly obvious advertisement for the Northern Territory and its islands. But for a rom-com – which the scriptwriters intended it to be – it’s thought-provoking and unexpectedly moving.
★★★ ½
Reviewed by Olga Azar
