Lantana

Ray Lawrence's movie, adapated from Andrew Bovell's play Speaking in Tongues, drew comparisons to Magnolia upon its release.  Both films have a set of disparate characters who are interlinked in a number of unusual ways, both films play with "big" themes such as love, loss, marriage, betrayal and fatherhood.  But whilst Magnolia never quite steps out of Robert Altman's shadow, Lantana quietly confirms itself as the superior film.

The story roughly revolves around four couples.  Married police detective Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia) is having an affair with Jane (Rachael Blake), who has recently separated from her husband Pete.  Whilst Leon is investigating the disappearance of psychiatrist Valerie (Barbara Hershey) he discovers that his wife Sonja (Kerry Armstrong) was one of her clients.  Valerie had recently published a book about the murder of her young daughter, an event that had crippled her marriage to John (Geoffrey Rush).  A high-heeled shoe thrown into the bushes across from Jane's house leads her to believe that her neighbour Nick, happily married to Paula, may be linked to Valerie's disappearance.

Lantana's greatest strength is in the way it misleads its audience at almost every turn.  Although all four couples are connected to Valerie somehow, things are much less complicated and more mundane than any of the characters at first believe.  Just as Valerie imagines her husband to be having an affair with a male client of hers, Leon believes John to be involved in his wife's disappearance and Jane believes her neighbour to be a murderer.  Each and every character deceives themselves, imagining complex answers to the questions they ask but more often than not faced with their own ordinary lives.  What at first seems like a labyrinthine murder mystery transpires to be a slow-burning, sophisticated drama about four suburban couples and the lies they tell themselves.

The performances are uniformally stunning.  Anthony LaPaglia has never been better and he's easily matched by Oscar winners Geoffrey Rush and Barbara Hershey.  The real stand-out though is Kerry Armstrong, in her feature film debut.  Everything about her seems perfect, from the slightly over-exaggerated embarassment when her salsa teacher dances with her, to her moving monologue about being middle-aged.  It's a beautiful, empathic, intelligent film which is, along with Japanese Story, possibly the best movie to come out of Australia in the last ten years.