Lantana (115 mins, 15) Directed by Ray Lawrence; starring Anthony LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush, Barbara Hershey
Are titles important? Well, they can put people off and cause unnecessary puzzlement, as was the case on both counts with Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie when released here as Meet Whiplash Willie. Ingmar Bergman was once asked to explain the title Winter Light. He replied that he had no idea as this was the invention of the foreign distributors. His picture was called Nattvardsgästerna ('The Communicants') because it was about people brought together by a church service. Ray Lawrence's Lantana, one of the best Australian pictures of recent years and a major critical and box-office success Down Under, has a title that is, to me at least, uninviting and, until I made inquiries, a mystery.
Initially, I thought Lantana must be a woman's name until I read somewhere that it was some kind of vegetation. The three dictionaries I had closest to hand - the New Oxford, Random House and Collins - told me it was a tropical shrub of the verbena family, its name coming from the Italian meaning 'wayfaring tree', though only Collins added that 'it was introduced into Australia where it is now regarded as a troublesome weed'.
This was useful because nowhere in the picture is the word explained for the benefit of ignorant poms, though the plant figures literally and figuratively in it. Adapted by Andrew Bovell (co-author of Strictly Ballroom) from his stage play, its original title was Speaking in Tongues.
The movie opens with a long tracking shot through undergrowth to discover a body - female, married, bloody, dead - caught up in a thicket that Australians will recognise as lantana. This intriguing shot suggests that the film will sooner or later reveal itself as an investigation into this woman's identity and what happened to her. We also come to see that lantana is a metaphor for the tangled relationships of the film's characters and, possibly, for the imported civilisation that has been spreading untended around the edges of Australia the way the weed proliferates along its roadsides.
The film's director, Ray Lawrence, is best known as a prizewinning specialist in TV commercials, having made his first (and until now only) movie, Bliss, a semi-surreal comedy based on Peter Carey's novel about an adman's collapsing marriage. Troubled marriage is also central to his new movie, but its style is realistic and the acting altogether subtler, more understated than in most Australian movies, though the dramatic infrastructure is, from first to last, carefully patterned.
The central marriage is that of Leon (Anthony LaPaglia), a Sydney police detective in his forties, frustrated, going to fat, troubled by chest pains, given to violence. He's currently having an affair with a woman separated from her husband, or not so much an affair, he thinks, as 'just a one-night stand, except that it happened twice'.
Leon's wife, Sonja (Kerry Armstrong), unknown to him, is in therapy, and her analyst, Valerie (Barbara Hershey), is herself in trouble. Valerie's 11-year-old daughter has been murdered, an event that has led her to write a therapeutic book, and she suspects her husband, an academic lawyer (Geoffrey Rush), of infidelity, possibly with a homosexual. A third marriage is that of the young, unemployed Italian immi grant, Nik, who lives with his wife and small children next door to the policeman's lover. In addition, there are two other significant relationships - the first between a gay analysand of Valerie's and a married man; the second between Leon's female assistant, a well-adjusted half-aborigine who can't find a suitable man in the police force and has a new boyfriend who keeps standing her up.
Without that body in the opening shot, we'd have supposed that Lantana was another relationship picture, a sexual merry-go-round of some intensity. Instead, we know this will become a psychological thriller. And when the body turns out to be no stranger to the audience, there is a series of further links as the cast are drawn together as investigators, suspects and witnesses. First, she's a missing person when she disappears after being picked up by a passing driver when she crashes her car at night on a country road. Then she's a corpse who may or may not have been murdered.
The crime, if that is what it was, provides a strong dramatic focus, but it does not distract from the movie's central themes - trust in its various forms, betrayal, forgiveness and grief. What is the moral, legal and emotional basis of trust? Is the failure to trust worse than trusting too easily, trusting without question? Can trust once betrayed, as between husband and wife, ever be fully restored?
These are important questions, perhaps too heavily emphasised in the dialogue, but powerfully dramatised in a thoughtful, gripping movie.
