Lantana
Directed by Ray Lawrence.
Starring Anthony LaPaglia, Kerry Armstrong, Rachael Blake, Geoffrey Rush
& Barbara Hershey.
This is Lawrence’s much-awaited second film, 16 years after the surreal Bliss. Lantana is realist, concerning relationships under stress and the role of trust. Leon Zat (LaPaglia) is a Sydney detective married to Sonja (Armstrong). Suffering a mid-life crisis, he has a fling with Jane O’May (Blake), herself separated from Pete (Glenn Robbins). Jane’s neighbours are Nik and Paula (Vince Colosimo, Daniella Farinacci), unsophisticated, hardworking and devoted to their children. Valerie Somers (Hershey) is a therapist whose marriage to academic John Knox (Rush) has become almost frozen since the murder of their daughter two years earlier. Initially separate, these characters come together in a series of interactions. Valerie’s disappearance throws the strained relationships into crisis.
It is hard to describe Lantana without making it sound like a soap-opera or a murder-mystery. It’s neither: it’s about what happens a decade or so after boy-meets-girl. As such, it probably speaks most to the over-40s (doubtless the source of its rave-reviews to date) but the under-30s might find the mid-life thing a bit tiresome. The film’s strengths are its visual style, the performances (though there are a couple of duds — whose idea was it to put Glenn Robbins in a serious role?), and some of the individual scenes are outstanding. The interactions are subtly and effectively handled to show how one character understands another’s experience and interprets it according to their own situation. Unfortunately, some of interactions and coincidences are a bit too neat, to the point that I started expecting them, and some are just superfluous. The ending is a few scenes too long drawn-out and is too well rounded-off which I felt undermined the theme of the whole film, that relationships are works in progress.
Well done, but less profound than it thinks it is. I’ll give it 3 out of 5 petals. (The lantana is a noxious weed with colourful flowers. Je ne sais pas pourquoi.)
Guy
