“What did you say?” – Reviewing <em>Lantana</em> (2001)

Last month I had my first commissioned assignment ever on this blog! And All Suns Are Darkened sent me a dvd with the 2001  Australian movie “Lantana”, asking me to do a review of it on the blog. I am so honoured that this excellent blogger would be interested in my opinion, and I am really sorry that it has taken me this long to write the review. As I’ve already hinted at, I’ve just been incredibly busy lately, and I didn’t want to do end up doing an inferior job of the review. But enough of my excuses, on with the review.

Lantana is directed by Ray Lawrence, and I knew absolutely nothing about it before I sat down to watch the dvd. The film did, however, affect me deeply, and I was sucked into the movie right from the first phrames of the film which showed the body of a woman lying in a lantana bush. It’s the classic way to open a crime story, but Lantana isn’t that, or not just that, it’s more of a love story about the things that unfold when evidence takes the place of testimony.

Still from "Lantana"

The film, most of which is composed as a flashback showing us the events leading up to the body being found in the bush, introduces a handful of characters that are all more or less directly linked to the woman’s body. Anthony LaPaglia plays police officer, Leon, whose marriage is crumbling. Leon is having an affair with Jane, a recently separated woman (played by Rachael Blake) while Leon’s wife Sonja is secretly consulting a therapist about her worries that she is losing Leon. The therapist, Valerie (Barbara Hershey), is having problems of her own: The book she has just written about the loss of her 11-year-old daughter Eleanor has failed to give her the release she desperately needs, and the grief is tearing Valerie and her husband John (Geoffrey Rush) apart. Troubled by the thought that John may be leaving her, Valerie finds herself threatened by the cynical persepectives of a client, Patrick, who is having an affair with a married man and blames his lover’s wife for her denial. In the middle of all this is Jane’s next-door neighbour unemployed Nik and his wife Paula, parents of three young children and struggling to pay the bills, but happily married. One night, Jane sees Nik toss a woman’s shoe into a bush…

Something gets broken
Is there really any way a man could throw a woman’s shoe into some bushes late at night without it being a sign of some awful crime having been comitted? Suspicion versus redeeming trust is at the core of the movie, and mistrust is an essential problem in almost all of the relationships in the movie. Valerie says as much in her speech at her book launching:

We don’t know what’s right or right or wrong anymore. (…) We ask, what can we believe in, what should be we believe in? Our politicians? Hardly. Our priests? You’d be amazed at how many of my clients come to see me because they once believed in priests. It’s not supposed to be that way, but it is. What then, our parents? Our home is our sanctuary. For a privileged few. For most it’s a battle ground. It’s not supposed to be that way, but it is.”

Geoffrey Rush’s character John confirms as much in a pivotal scene in which he and Leon discuss their respective marriages:

“Have you ever cheated on your wife? (…) Well, you’re a better man than I am. (…) There was someone once. A woman. Once that’s happened you’re never entirely believed again. Something gets broken, permanently – trust, I suppose. When that’s happened anything’s possible it woud seem.”

Collisions
But what I like the best about the movie is that John is actually – subtly – proven wrong. In Lantana it’s not the mistrust itself that seems to be the most damaging, it’s the failure to communicate that lack of trust, and the scenes that deal with these breaches of communication are what really makes the movie stand out to me. Ray Lawrence has something truly original at heart here, I think. One amazing scene has a frantic Valerie standing at the side of a road, talking into a payphone to her husband’s answering machine. She’s asking John to come pick her up and telling him that she needs him, but the message gets muddled by a not-quite-articulated suspicion:

“I’m on the back road, and… I just wanted to get home. (…) I called road service, they said there were going to be a 90-minute wait. Where are you? You didn’t say you were going to be late. I can’t stand this! Please… Please, I need you. (…) John? There’s a man… Patrick. He’s a client and he’s… he’s gay. I don’t understand this, I don’t understand us… anymore. I don’t want this to be happening to us.”

The message goes unanswered by her husband – with disastrous results. And this is far from the only scene in the movie where communication goes horribly wrong. Sonja wisely makes the point during a therapy session that Leon cheating wouldn’t be a problem in itself, but him cheating and not telling her would be, and after being deeply upset by her client Patrick and not voicing her anger to him, Valerie has a miserable non-conversation with a random stranger (Pete – Jane’s husband) whom she happens to pass in the street:

Pete silently passes Valerie in the street
Valerie: What did you say?
Pete: What?
Valerie: You said something to me.
Pete: No, I didn’t.
Valerie: Yes, you did!
Pete: I didn’t.
Valerie (to a bystander): You heard him, didn’t you?! He said something!
Pete: This is bullshit…
Valerie: Bullshit? I want your name.
Pete starts walking away
Valerie: Give me your name! Your name!

And this scene mirrors another scene which, to me was the most powerful scene of the entire movie, and to which I wouldn’t do justice by quoting it here as it doesn’t actually have much dialogue: Jogging in his neighbourhood, Leon bumps into a stranger in the sidewalking while turning a corner without looking. The collision causes him to accidentally headbutt the stranger. This leaves Leon with a massive blow to the head and it seemingly breaks the stranger’s nose. Blood everywhere, Leon starts shouting abuse at the stranger, blaming him for the accident. The stranger cowers and starts stuttering away. Leon then sees the stranger’s groceries lying on the street, he picks them up and follows him, trying to make amends. The stranger breaks down sobbing in a startled Leon’s arms.

It’s really one of the most powerful scenes I’ve seen in a long time in any movie, and it actually had my crying. Not so much because of the blood and the implied physical injury (although this was certainly graphic enough! So much blood.), but because of the implied psychological impact: The shock, the misdirected aggression, the hurt, the emotional response – and the short glimpse of compassion between two people. If misunderstandings and mistrust are inevitable between people, then it’s at least possible for us to make amends by genuinely communication with each other, so the movie seems to say.

Ray Lawrence and the “Short Cuts” premise
The actors’ performances are excellent all around, and the art direction is brilliant as well. The opening shot of the film – zooming in through the pretty surface of a beautiful, blooming lantana bush, uncovering a bloody corpse lying between the tangled, dark branches while insects are buzzing – is iconic and reminded me somewhat of some of the nature morte-ish shots from Peter Weir’s excellent Picnic at Hanging Rock. It sets the movie’s tone of merciless scrutiny which is balanced by the aforementioned subtle sense of hope in the interacting between the characters.

I’ll admit that I was a bit worried when I first realized that the various’ character stories were all going to be intertwined somehow. I loved that premise in Short Cuts, but so many directors have tried to pull it off since and failed (most notably the clumsy and pretentious Playing by Heart). However, Lantana does this really well, especially because Lawrence actually manages to use it in quite a clever way: Several times I was fooled by this premise into suspecting that there was going to be a connection between two stories that turned out not to have a connection at all. An ingenious way to demonstrate the theme of suspicion and misunderstanding even in the narrative level of the movie.

And All Suns are Darkened did a review of the movie in his Top 5 of Australian movies himself – read it here.

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