User Reviews

This is an enjoyable film about a noisy bunch of friends, sometimes supportive and sometimes at odds with each other. It is particularly about the one woman, Clare, played by Noni Hazlehurst, in their midst who is facing her own unique challenges and decisions, which the friends may or may not assist her with.

This film catches the sensibilities and sexual politics of a section of the Australian leftist middle-class of the 1980s nicely. Fiona Press won the AFI Best Supporting Actress Award for this film and McKimmie was nominated for the best director award.

(These extra words were required by IMDb to make up 600 characters - I'm obviously too taciturn)

Australian writer/director has a talent for extended ensemble playing but her attempts at drama are diluted by her penchant for grotesquery.

Here artist Clare Fairweather (Noni Hazelhurst) is expecting the arrival of a child she has produced as a surrogate home birth for her friend Sandy (Helen Jones) one of her `mafia' group of female friends. When the birth is imminent, the isolated bush farmhouse where she lives is visited by friends and their extended families. However the waiting of the title brings about a crisis, as Clare considers keeping the baby, and that McKimmie offers no resolution is indicative of her touch.

McKimmie's screenplay includes a film of the birth which is being made in super 8 presented as black-framed point-of-view, Clare swimming under water, an abandoned castrated lamb that dies, Sandy having 2 adopted multicultural children, the house located on Perseverance Road, doubt about the father of Clare's child, rain, a constantly barking dog, infidelities, and the baby born in a caravan. The footage of spied upon doctors playing golf is witty and Clare's contractual yell is juxtaposed with girlie pictures on the ceiling, however the dialogue is on the level of strine cliches or lines like `You don't need a rectal thermometer to know who the assholes are' and `My career has miscarried'. The songs Que Sera Sera and Ave Maria on the soundtrack also are not assets. McKimmie has the balance to equal her portraits of men as fools with the women equally exposed, and she also shows the casual hostility of the Australian psyche.

McKimmie provides Jones with a long close-up when she hears that the baby is born, and reveals the essential loneliness of Clare amongst the clutter around her. Mention is made of the sensuality of Deborra-Lee Furness' Diane, though Hazelhurst, like in McKimmie's previous Australian Dream has been better served by Ken Cameron in Monkey Grip (1982) and by Glenda Hambly in Fran (1985).