Lantana

Plot synopsis:
An unknown woman's body is seen caught in the lantana bush, missing a shoe. Leon (Anthony LaPaglia), a police officer, and Jane (Rachael Blake) have sex in a motel room. They part ways, and we see that Leon and his wife Sonja (Kerry Armstrong) attend Latin dance classes that the recently-separated Jane is also taking. Leon does not enjoy the classes, and is seen savagely beating a drug dealer during a bust. He has emotional issues, but won't confront or admit to them. Sonja sees a therapist, Valerie (Barbara Hershey) who has just published a book on her own daughter's murder 18 months ago. She and her husband, John, (Geoffrey Rush) are barely on speaking terms; he later refers to their marriage as held together by their grief. She feels threatened by another patient of hers, Patrick Phelan, who is having an affair with a married man and is forcing Valerie to confront her own issues in her marriage to John.
Hoping to see Leon again, Jane purposely bumps into him outside the police station, and they have sex again, despite Leon's reservations about taking it any further. Her next door neighbour, Nik, is upset that she is seeing someone because he is friends with her estranged husband Pete, who wants to return home. Jane pairs up with Sonja in the next salsa class, which angers Leon; he ends their arrangement, which upsets Jane. She invites Nik over for coffee at the behest of his wife, Paula, with whom she is friendly, and offers him money as they are struggling. Paula starts to dislike Jane because of it.
Valerie is coming home late one night and drives off the road. She is stranded, and makes several calls to John, who does not answer. Finally, she is seen approaching a car coming along the road, but never makes it home. Leon is the investigating detective on the case, and looks into her office and notes. Surprised at seeing his wife's name and file, he takes a recording of their sessions.
Leon arrives home late but Sonja is not asleep: he asks her about her therapy sessions with Valerie, they discuss their relationship and he tells her of his affair which had just ended, but that he still loves her. Sonja is very upset and feels betrayed. Leon sleeps on the couch, in the morning Sonja says he'll be lucky if she returns home that night. Leon goes to John's house to interrogate him as the main suspect in his wife's disappearance. Leon starts a discussion about love, marriage and having affairs but lies to John when asked if he ever had an affair. Leon goes to Jane's house on police duty, because she has placed a call. Her neighbours are Paula (Daniella Farinacci), a nurse, and Nik (Vince Colosimo). Jane was up late one night, watching Nik arrive home and throw something in the bushes across the road from her house: later she finds it is a woman's shoe. Leon and his partner arrive at Jane's and declare that the shoe was Valerie's.
The police take Nik to the station and he leaves his children with Jane. Police call Paula to come in from her work. Neither Nik nor Paula knows that Jane made the police call. Although Paula does not like Jane, she calls her to thank her for minding their children. The police interrogate Nik but he refuses to answer questions about Valerie, repeatedly asking to see Paula. After seeing his wife, Nik calms down and talks with Leon and his partner. Valerie had car trouble and Nik was driving past; he agreed to give her a lift to her home but she panicked when he took a back road short cut and left his truck. Valerie had run off leaving behind her shoe. Paula goes to Jane's house to get her children, where she tells her that Nik is innocent of Valerie's disappearance. Jane asks how she knows that, and Paula simply replies that he told her. Jane asks if she can spend more time with the kids, but Paula forbids it, after seeing how Jane went over into her house and tidied it. Leon, his partner, Nik, and John go to the place where Valerie jumped out of the truck. They find her body where she had accidentally fallen down a ravine. Leon listens to the rest of the therapy tape where his wife had said that she still loved him and he bursts into tears.
Leon returns home and sees his wife outside. Jane salsa dances alone, drinking and smoking, while Pete leaves her. Patrick is pained to see his lover happily spending time with his wife and kids. Nik and Paula are seen happily spending time with their kids. The movie ends with Sonja and Leon dancing together seductively. Leon, who at the beginning of the film finds dancing with his wife difficult, now appears to be doing well. He looks Sonja directly in her eyes and dances just as she always wanted. Sonja struggles to initially return Leon's gaze but does so just before the movie ends.

Tags: realism, romantic, murder, flashback

Review:
In this starkly realistic examination of love and infidelity among the thirtysomething crowd from down under we learn that you may desire to cheat on your spouse, but it's better if you don't.Leon Zat, a police detective played with an original and striking demeanor by Anthony LaPaglia, cheats on his wife and finds that his adultery compromises not only his marriage but his performance on the job.
Even Sonja Zat (Kerry Armstrong) feels the pressure and yearns to feel attractive, perhaps with younger men.More than halfway through we have an apparent murder and an investigation during the course of which some of the adulteries come to light and cause the participants to examine themselves and their lives closely.Andrew Dovell wrote the subtle, richly attired script, full of penetrating dialogue and an uncompromising veracity, adapting it from his play Speaking in Tongues.
The plot and interaction between characters depends heavily on coincidence, but this isn't a major flaw in a film that really concerns itself with adult behavior patterns.
The classic 'mystery' thread was really only the setting for the several different relationships and couples featured in the film.But having said that, the story itself was gutsy and twisting to keep you guessing till the end, all without the need for non-essential narrative or the need to keep spelling things out.
His character, though shown as an adulterer from the very beginning, captured so many of the current male 'indentities' with great subtlety instead of a stereotyped 'hug session'  which most recent films dealing with the subject matter inevitably lead to.
He so easily showed the internal conflicts which most normal Australian men deal with day-to-day while still keeping up the brave face we all do.I also enjoyed the quirky way the relatively small number of characters were all drawn together by fairly consequential links, and without a huge big statement of it in the end - no matter how many people there are on the planet, it still amazes me how small and incestual problem-circles end up becoming :)This film has the potential to appeal to so many different audiences - works as a mystery, cop-drama, "chick flick", and to anyone who could ever relate to the 'feel' of Australia, which the film captures perfectly through great ambient audio and natural-looking lighting.Well written, directed, photographed and cast give this one an easy full marks..
This was certainly a nice surprise coming from Australia, which has given us a great many interesting films and that keeps telling world wide audiences there sure is life after Hollywood and the formula styled fare that has been coming from the La-La Land in the last years.To begin with, the cast is first rate.
There was a lot of audience talking as the story was half-told visually --a particularly neat change from the original play--and the coincidences would be revealed to the audience.This is a sophisticated film for grown-ups that absolutely respects the intelligence of its viewers.
The first hour of the film is based solely on the relationships of its interconnecting characters.We next see Leon (Anthony LaPaglia) having sex with a woman, who we later learn to be Jane (Rachael Blake).
This is the one relationship that is the exception to the film's rule.The subtle hints we're given may or may not be important later on in the story, which after the half-way mark involves a police investigation; and the film manages to remain a drama about its characters throughout.
In one scene between Leon and John (who is a suspect in his wife's disappearance) John admits that he didn't listen to his wife's very real cries for help.By the end of the film, its stance towards marriage becomes, I think, increasingly pessimistic, as if any slight crack in a relationship would mean that both sides are doomed.
Though the film involves a cop, a shrink, a missing woman, infidelity, adultery, grief, suspicion, etc., "Lantana" isn't about any of these things; a fact which is made clear in the end when the final puzzle piece is dropped into place.
Lantana has some nice moments where everything in the film seems to be falling into place (more in terms of its internal logic and aesthetics than in any sense of plot resolution), and it has a modest, documentary quality that captures middle class lifestyle in an interesting and infrequently seen fashion.
In terms of its formal structure it is pursuing the genre of intertwined short stories pioneered by Robert Altman in movies like Nashville and Short Cuts, and most specifically plays out like an Aussie Magnolia, where these intertwined stories continually intersect in coincidental fashion.Unlike Magnolia, however, the movie demonstrates little sense of humor about its use of such coincidence to drive the plot forward; everything seems to be played for melodramatic effect, so that in some respects the tone comes to resemble an American soap opera: bickering families, incestuous affairs, dark secrets that are dying to get out under every roof, all interspersed with long, suffering gazes by the several protagonists.The plot feels over-constructed; the irony is that by tying things up a little too neatly the director suffocates the story with theme, and ultimately creates a film that doesn't seem to mean much of anything.
Altman, who can be credited with, if not inventing this style of filmmaking (perhaps the soap operas, after all, deserve that credit), at least with being the first to exploit it completely, understands that the chaos between the coincidence is a necessary component both in terms of realism, and in its ability to make the meaning seem organic to the situation, rather than imposed by an author.Lantana is an interesting movie, but it isn't a very good one..
Particularly enjoyed the sharp Aussie wit and black humour that flowed with the unfolding of the plot.Antony LaPaglia plays a believable role and as sub plot you see his character change in the space of two hours.All in all a very enjoyable film..
" Lantana" reeks of death, or maybe it just smells like excrement.There is some fine acting and interesting vignettes here in search of a movie.Perhaps a more experienced director might have realized that he needed to find it.
Lantana is ostensibly a mystery-drama about the disappearance of a psychiatrist, Barbara Hersey, that is investigated by a flawed-but-not-bad cop, Anthony LaPaglia.
While I didn't see him as the center of this film (that goes to Hershey's character), I did think that he out shined even the great Geoffrey Rush.
These two tremendous actors stapled the film, while the rest seemed to simply move the plot closer to the ending credits.With such powerful acting, why didn't this movie succeed in my mind?
The 2001 film "Lantana" goes underneath the shrubs and takes a look at the lives of several couples whose lives are intertwined by the disappearance of a psychiatrist, Valerie Somers (Barbara Hershey).
There's a police officer Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia) who is taking dance lessons with his wife Sonja (Kerry Armstrong) and has an affair with another student, Jane (Rachel Blake); Jane's neighbors, with a husband (Manu Bennett) out of work; and the psychiatrist's own dysfunctional marriage to John Knox (Geoffrey Rush) after their daughter is murdered.
My two favorite opposing examples of this are the classic film "San Francisco," where the earthquake happens in the last half hour of the movie, and "Poseidon" where stock characters have a line each before the ship sinks in the first five minutes of the movie."Lantana" is an intriguing film that will keep the audience wondering and guessing - does Valerie suspect her client of an involvement with her husband?
Hershey is effective as a psychiatrist forced to listen to people's problems while disturbed about her own dead marriage, and Rush's frozen face displays no emotion, yet we know he's dying inside.A really fine movie, well worth seeing.
Great acting all around by people who look like the role they are portraying.There are a lot of comments on this site that portray the film as a bore and I attribute that to the deliberate pacing employed.
Unless you have an aversion to character development, understated intrigue and a plot that doesn't spoonfeed you, go and see this film.The acting of the ensemble cast was out of the top drawer: Anthony LaPaglia was a revelation to me (and no, I didn't know he's Australian either), creating a deeply flawed and human policeman; Kerry Armstrong was just perfect as his spouse, champing at the bit to get more passion into her life, and conveying just that quality herself; Geoffrey Rush showed his infinite range - he can be OTT (Quills), damaged (Shine), malevolently powerful (Elizabeth) - here he's almost inscrutable.
This romantic, conversational and atmospheric thriller which is set in Sydney, Australia and where interpersonal relations and personalities are acutely examined and characters as poignant as the stories, is impelled and reinforced by it's cogent narrative structure, subtle character development, enigmatic characters, incorporation of theater in cinema and the reverent acting performances by Australian actors Anthony LaPaglia and Geoffrey Rush, Australian actresses Rachael Blake and Kerry Armstrong and American actress Barbara Hershey.
Although the film involves a murder, the story is more the exploration of a number of interconnected relationships.The film starts with a woman's body lying in a lantana bush, but we don't know who it is until the end.
The story builds up to that point, and centres on a quartet of families starting with Leon Zat (Anthony La Paglia), a police detective, and his wife Sonja (Kerry Armstrong)."Lantana", the title of the film, refers to the noxious weed that grows like crazy and eventually strangles and entangles everything else in the garden - it's the perfect metaphor for the way all the various relationships are being strangled and entangled by infidelity, deception and unhappiness.The structure of the film is similar to Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" where different stories intersect at critical times.Although the film has a sense of mystery, I found "Lantana" just too serious and humourless.
What saves "Lantana" is that everyone plays it low-key - the actors give the movie class.The brilliant Barbara Hershey has competition for attention from two other women: Kerry Armstrong and Rachael Blake.
Kerry Armstrong is one of the most interesting actors in Australian film and television, and she ages beautifully.The film steps up a notch when the mystery kicks in about halfway through, and it becomes partly a police procedural."Lantana" was loved up by the critics and won every Australian film award going at the time it was released.
To some this will be a source of frustration because, for the first half of the film it means that we are unsure where we are meant to be going; it does a good job of developing the characters but I did wonder for what reason or direction.
LaPaglia, Armstrong, Hershey, Rush and Blake all work well together and individually.An interesting film then that works off the back of engaging characters and relationships.
(I wrote this in 2001, and just discovered I posted it for another movie, so I put it here, as it is...)I'm much too shaken for critical distance, but I still feel the urge to tell everybody to see it, unless you're allergic to the genre.The cinematography, while extremely beautiful, never stops from supporting the story.I hope the incredibly dense sound texture of the opening sequence is on the original soundtrack (most of the music is very efficient, though maybe too present some times).The director has given every one of his deeply sad characters a human quality that keeps them from being pathetic, so they're "just" very human.
This drama about flawed relations and unforseen effects of the interactions between the people involved is a great movie - one of the very best, ever.As most very good films it involves a small cast and just a few settings, it has no car chases, no bravado and no guns, but is still one of the most riveting films I've seen.
The main characters are four couples, each with its own problems, and a gay man, who's in love with one of husbands, and two individuals, that at the end of the film meet.Most, if not all , the actors were unknown to me, before I watched this film (Geoffrey Rush and Barbara Hershey being the exceptions), but I must say I capitulate totally!
Ladies and Gentlemen, you're are a very good selection of Australian actors, indeed, and you all acted excellently in every way!The film is based on a play written by Anthony Bovell (who also wrote the script) called Speaking in Tongues, and it shows.
This is a small film, made up of telling moments in peoples' lives and held together by odd connections between the characters' lives, much like those in Robert Altman's Short Cuts, though this story has a tighter weave than anything Altman made.
I've seen other movies about infidelity in different relationships, and the different characters interlocking through their infidelities (I think that's the plot of every Edward Burns' film).
There are loads of fortunate coincidences, but we don't mind because each one resolves a situation or has its resolution later, and changes the destinies of people we grow to like very much.There are some smashing performances, notably from Antony LaPaglia as the brutal but mixed up cop and Kerry Armstrong, magnificent as his tormented wife, who can't figure out why their relationship and her life are falling apart.True life drama.
But what made this film so much better than the average thriller is that the characters were so full bodied and developed that I found myself rooting for all of them--there didn't seem to be any bad guys, just real people caught up in the thorny complexities of real life.
A great film that makes you believe that 2+2 = 5 I thought this was a very interesting idea  a plot that gives you all the clues and lets you add them all up if like me you got 2+2 = 5 then you are not alone.Very well played by a cast lead by Anthony LaPaglia, thought most of the cast were very good.I really enjoyed this film  a lot  it lead me down all the wrong paths in a totally believable way.
The dense plotting, multi-threaded narrative cleverly obscures the fact that Lantana, one of the most overrated Australian films ever made,is just an upmarket soap-opera without the necessary gloss one expects from Aussie films.Anthony La Paglia plays a very unlikeable cop while his long-suffering wife is far more sympathetic - in fact - the only likable character in the movie.
The rest of the cast is a who's who of antipodean cinema - with Geoffrey Rush the least convincing as the husband of Barbara Hershey's character, who is the only American in the cast.Lantana also reminded me of Altman's vastly superior Short Cuts.
There are many characters and interwoven scenarios but even I could guess the twist way before the end.At times, the dull tone of the film made me a little impatient and I felt it created a forced mood of mock-seriousness - it was as if the director was urging his cast to be po-faced and realist in ways that Aussie soap-operas cannot but at least that much-maligned genre does not have pretensions of grandeur.
On top of that, Lawrence masters a tactile sense of fluidity and empathy into the story-line, sublimates an urban mystery into an intoxicating study of love, trust, betrayal, deception and grief, and renders its poignant after-effect anything but fault-finding.Great ensemble consisted of a mostly indigenous cast (Armstrong, Blake and Colosimo all deserve a name-check), LaPaglia returns to his motherland from his usual Hollywood turf and is instigated into an arresting turn easily his career-best, a tough cop compromised by his betrayal out of domestic ennui, not entirely sympathetic but the performance is undeniably visceral.
Granted, it is easy to bill this 2002 Australian drama as a thriller, but those who expect such a film may be disappointed by a relatively slow-burning plot and moderately paced character study.
That said, the supporting characters are quite fascinating too; Kerry Armstrong has a very strong turn as LaPaglia's wife, while Geoffrey Rush and Barbara Hershey hold a lot of interest in how differently they react to their preteen daughter's death.
The film's promotional tagline - "sometimes love isn't enough" - comes from something Rush says about his own marriage, and all of the relationship drama in the film (not only between LaPaglia and Armstrong) seems to revolve around this paradigm in a sense.
I hate it when movies (particularly this one that appeared to take itself seriously)attempt to give us a warm feeling by showing how well everything turned out for most of the characters.LaPaglia was good, he doesn't know how to be otherwise - although his Aussie accent slipped in a couple of places.
What a great Aussie fillum.No imitation Hollywood two-dimensional formula here -- just a good script and an excellent cast creating a contemporary adult drama that touched on a variety of issues in an engaging manner.I think the best thing about Lantana was its measured, low-key understatement.
As a consequence, the characters and the situations they found themselves in were utterly believable -- so much so I wondered which character was most like my own.While holding a mirror to the shortcomings of Aussie men and women, the film is not judgemental and, in the end, offers hope -- if not comfort -- to everyone caught in a patch of lantana.I guess the message is this: Don't go there in the first place -- unless you know the way out.And do any of us?.
The principal cast (including Anthony Lapaglia; Geoffrey Rush; Barbara Hershey; Kerry Armstrong and Rachel Blake) are excellent and believable.If it were not for its Australian Made tag, Lantana is a Best Picture film.
Not only is the film a ripper, but the cast features internationally recognised box office drawcards such as Anthony LaPaglia and Geoffrey Rush, mixing with American guest star Barbara Hershey, to give Lantana real credibility.