Japanese Story

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating; * * * * *)

It's been 10 years since Toni Collette towed our hearts away as the nuptially-challenged title character in Muriel's Wedding, and it says much about the film industry's obsession with size eight blondes that this gifted and intelligent actress, though busy, hasn't had a lead role since.

Director Brooks and writer Alison Tilson, the team behind the hugely charming comedy Road to Nhill, redress matters richly here, casting Collette in a handsome and imaginative film that seems like a cross-cultural comedy of manners, but morphs - suddenly yet subtly - into something far deeper and more challenging.

Collette plays Sandy Edwards, a workaholic Perth geologist who is far from at ease with herself. She smokes a lot, eats little and badly, and her private life - she works with her last lover - is as arid and empty as her sterile apartment.

She is good at her work, developing prospecting software, which is why she flares when her business partner (Dyktynski) asks her to fly to remote Port Hedland to babysit a visiting Japanese man, Tachibana Hiromitsu (Tsunashima), who may represent a big business opportunity.

"I'm a geologist," she explodes, "not a bloody geisha."

What unfolds seems at first simply an acidic story of culture clash, although Brooks and Tilson depict it sparely and glancingly in small moments - the pose for a self-timed photograph, the handling of baggage and business cards.

Quickly it becomes plain that he thinks she's his driver; he complains in a cellphone call that she's aggressive and big-bummed, but he's aggressive in his own way, disguising his command of English in peremptory monosyllabic demands.

Against her better judgment they head into the outback - this is the first feature shot in the red and eerily beautiful Pilbara of Australia's northwest and the desert becomes the film's third, and sometimes main, character. What happens next ought not to be disclosed but it's safe to say that the film has something extraordinary in store.

White Australians' attitude - equal parts wonder, horror and callous indifference - to their sunburned hinterland has been a central preoccupation of the country's art, including its cinema, but this film takes a strikingly original approach.

It is the visitor who wants to explore the outback - Sandy knows it only as land that needs the riches extracted from it. The Australian has other landscapes to explore that are, at the film's opening, unseen and mysterious; an alien culture, which, almost 60 years after the Pacific War, still sparks fear and suspicion.

If this makes the film sound complicated and metaphysical, it shouldn't. It has at its centre a cracking good, straight-ahead yarn - an adventure story even - but like the best drama it conceals beneath its outer skin something far more ineffable and suggestive.

The film is not without its faults; for such a can-do girl, Sandy's a bit feckless under stress and there is some outback nonsense such as firewood in treeless expanses and a too-easily-bogged 4WD. But Collette is beyond brilliant and the film earns a five-star rating for its deeply felt sense of what it is to be human in a world where we understand each other too little.

Cast: Toni Collette, Gotaro Tsunashima, Matthew Dyktynski, Lynette Curran, Yumiko Tanaka

Director: Sue Brooks

Running time: 110 mins

Rating: M (contains adult themes),

Screening: Public previews this week, screening at Rialto and Bridgeway cinemas from Thursday.