Mystery untangles in intriguing style

By PETER CALDER

Caption1: Anthony LaPaglia and Kerry Armstrong in Lantana.

Lantana

(Herald rating: * * * *)

An intense, sophisticated chamber piece which won seven awards (including all four acting gongs) at the Australian equivalent of the Oscars, this film is only the second feature outing for Lawrence, an acclaimed commercials director who made an engaging adaptation of Peter Carey's novel Bliss in 1985.

It starts out looking like a conventional murder mystery as the camera tracks furtively through a thicket of the plant - a noxious, knotty weed with blowzy, aromatic flowers which gives the film its title - to conduct a leisurely inspection of a bruised female body.

And indeed the plot is at times pure police procedural; homicide detective Leon Zat will spend much of his screen time trying to find out how the woman died.

But the film, scripted by Andrew Bovell from his own play Speaking In Tongues, is concerned to explore thickets of a different kind. Owing obvious debts to a long line of directors from Bergman to Altman, but driven by a fierce and original intelligence, Lantana swiftly becomes an engrossing and thoughtful rumination on the nature of marriage and the precarious process of being human.

Its suspense derives from the fact that it is some time before we find out the identity of the dead woman, much less how she died. Everyone we meet, whose lives intersect with an intense but never implausible symmetry, might be either victim or perpetrator but the process by which we arrive at the mystery's solution is every bit as important as the solution.

The labyrinth of the film's relationships radiates out from psychiatrist Valerie Somers (Hershey) whose marriage to her dry academic husband (Rush) has been eviscerated by the murder of their 11-year-old daughter. Her clients include Sonja (Armstrong), whose husband, Zat, is having an affair and a gay man who, Valerie fancies, may be involved with her own husband.

When one of the characters goes missing, false assumptions abound and Zat, assigned the case, finds evidence which blurs the lines between his private and professional life.

It all sounds impossibly contrived, but the script dovetails the stories so skilfully that watching the film is a giddy delight. LaPaglia, an Adelaide native, is a sturdy fulcrum for a set of performances. Some 10 characters are integral which are almost uniformly superb and the score, by songsmith Paul Kelly, works perfectly with Mandy Walker's eerie but unpretentious cinematography.

It's not flawless: the casting of Glenn Robbins - The Comedy Company's Uncle Arthur - is an egregious error and the generally overrated Rush, whose emotional trauma looks suspiciously like sullen inexpressiveness, fails in a crucial role. More fatally, the film runs on a little long, seeking to tie up ends which might have been better left dangling.

But Lantana is easily the most intriguing, engrossing and satisfying film of the summer so far. Don't miss it.

Cast: Anthony LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush, Barbara Hershey, Rachael Blake, Kerry Armstrong, Vince Colosimo
Director: Ray Lawrence
Rating: M
Running time: 120 mins
Screening: Previews this and next weekend, Village and Rialto cinemas. Opens Thursday, Jan 31