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The ensemble cast includes Anthony LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush, Barbara Hershey, Kerry Armstrong, Glenn Robbins, Peter Phelps and Rachael Blake. The film is all about the performances.
Lantana -- it's a foliage thing, this title -- opens with a shot of a dead woman lying in thick underbrush and vines. Her face is never shown. On that note of dread, the story begins. Here is the central character, a detective (LaPaglia), who happens to be introduced in a compromising situation. We meet his girlfriend, then his wife, his wife's psychiatrist, the psychiatrist's husband, the young couple next door, the police partner.
All the characters are connected in one way or another. Most of them worry about the state of their marriages. Most of them worry about their relationships in general. They treat one another with doubt and worry and suspicion, deceiving themselves and everybody else in the process.
Meanwhile, the dead woman glimpsed at the beginning of the film could turn out to be any one of the women in the story, which would seem to be the point. What one imagines or anticipates, and what is real, are often very different.
Most of the characters in Lantana are middle-aged and worried about it. The conversations run to love, marriage, sexual attraction, relationships, age, intimacy, infidelity and like that.
The characters are believable. Same with the dialogue.
Lantana was shot in Sydney and involves plenty of faces not yet well-known to North American audiences, always a good thing for the willing suspension of disbelief.
Though the creation of tension, courtesy of a sort of filmic mind game, is impressive, Lantana is a love story. Bodies aside, it's a story about loyalty and trust. And their absence.
(This film is rated AA)