Love Is in the Air WAYNE BLAIR’S TOP END WEDDING AND THE ROM-COM’S NEW DIRECTION
Lauren (Miranda Tapsell) is a confident young Aboriginal corporate lawyer living in Adelaide; her partner, British immigrant Ned (Gwilym Lee), is a Crown prosecutor. While she is thriving in her career (albeit clumsily – trying to hide broken heels under her desk, frantically brushing pastry sugar off her lapel), he is struggling with the morals of working to prosecute elderly women for minor infractions. She is offered a promotion; he quits and, rather than telling Lauren he has done so, proposes.
It is, of course, a ‘yes’ – but there is quickly a catch: her boss, Hampton (an icy Kerry Fox), has offered her an immediate ten days off work before her promotion kicks in, and Lauren wants to get married now. In Darwin. With her parents. Easy enough, thinks Ned. But, in Darwin, there’s just Lauren’s dad, Trevor (Huw Higginson), hiding himself in the pantry and crying to Chicago’s ‘If You Leave Me Now’. Her mum, Daffy (Ursula Yovich), is nowhere to be found.
Top End Wedding (2019), directed by Wayne Blair from a script by first-time feature writers Tapsell and Joshua Tyler, is a rare incursion by Australian cinema into romantic comedy. The film’s promotional poster captures the tropes of the genre straightaway: the smiling woman, the perhaps slightly apprehensive man, the dog (a staple of comic relief in a genre already defined by its comedy). Its trailer, too, captures this spirit: the funky music, the escalation of the stakes, the jokes, the girlfriends, the awkward soon-to-be in-laws, the dog embarrassed and laying
