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Lantana [2002]
from Vision Video Ltd.
starring Anthony LaPaglia, Geoffrey Rush, Rachael Blake, Kerry Armstrong, Manu Bennett
directed by Ray Lawrence

Features:

• PAL

Editorial Review:

Lantana teased its subtle way into the minds of cinemagoers in 2002 with a welcome reminder that nothing succeeds like a well-written, hypnotically acted drama that reflects the humanity, complexity and frailty of its audiences right back at them. Lantana is about betrayal, grief beyond recovery and the tenuous threads by which the most superficially ordinary relationships founder or survive. At the same time, it is quietly and profoundly life-affirming. It is, as producer Jan Chapman suggests during the director's commentary, "a film you have to pay attention to". But it rewards that attention.

Andrew Bovell's economic, absorbing script is based on his original stage play Speaking in Tongues. A series of coincidences creates a network of links between characters with unsettling and often shattering consequences. Like another Australian classic, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Lantana explores a constantly shifting line between deceit and honesty. It is a psychological mystery in which the land itself claims a life that has nowhere else to go. Director Ray Lawrence draws minutely observed performances from his actors, particularly Anthony LaPaglia as Leon, the Sydney detective in the throes of mid-life crisis, Kerry Armstrong as his wife Sonia and Barbara Hershey as Valerie, the psychologist whose panic finally releases her from an untenable situation. Lantana is engrossing from beginning to end.

On the DVD: Lantana is presented in 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen with a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, bringing the extraordinary, realistic lighting of the original cinematography to life on the small screen. Paul Kelly's brooding score and the leitmotif of the Salsa songs make huge contributions to an intimate and often raw viewing experience. Apart from the fascinating director's commentary which tellingly reveals that a major Hollywood studio loved the concept but declined the project because the marketing department couldn't work out how to sell it, extras include the requisite making-of documentary, trailers and biographies. --Piers Ford

Customer Reviews:

• Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0

• A film for grown-ups
  This is an excellent film that explores the emotional turmoil of four relationships. The film avoids just wallowing in these emotions by weaving the couples together by the investigation of a suspicious death.
  It's a film that will appeal more to those who have had some experience of life and can empathize with the feelings and experiences of the characters.

• Thorns in the Garden
  When I first saw this taut moody thriller, I found it absorbing, but I simply could not identify with the characters (which are, nevertheless, portrayed by an excellent ensemble cast). Why, I thought, doesn't an otherwise intelligent woman--a psychiatrist yet--who has wrecked her car, and has walked several kilometers down a dark lonely road to a pay-phone, call 999 (or its Australian equivalent)? And I found Anthony Lapaglia simply unappealing. That was then.
  I have since watched the film several more... more info

• Satisfying and somber
  I'm not sure how much play this Australian movie received in the U.S. and Britain, but whatever it was it deserved more. In a great opening shot, it starts with the implication that there has been a murder, but it moves steadily into a study of people, basically four couples, and how they come together in ways that are deeply emotional and questioning. Anthony LaPaglia plays Leon Zat, a Sydney detective who is trying to find out who the body is and what happened. He's married, burned out, unhappy, with a... more info

• Engrossing, superbly acted but slow adult drama
  Silly me. Watching this film I thought Lantana was some sort of exotic dance but apparently it's a thorny shrub and this film opens with a women's unidentified body lying in amongst this shrub. The shrub is also a metaphor for the entangled lives on display. As the plot unfolds we gradually learn her identity through the intertwining lives of several people, most of them couples undergoing various levels of relationship strife.
  Adapted from a stage play "Speaking in Tongues" it occasionally reveals its... more info

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