GRADE: A-

A deliberately paced forward tracking shot takes us deeper and deeper into a throng of exotic flowering plants before gently lilting beside a form that is revealed to be the lifeless body of a woman. That signals a murder mystery may be in-store, but the magic of this excellent Australian import is in its subsequent use of that mystery to deconstruct its ensemble of characters more so than the mechanics of the crime.

Winner of every major Australian Film Institute Award, including Best Picture, Lantana is a quiet knockout of a film; a crisscrossing of several major characters whose separate stories careen and collide in a cavalcade of marital deceit and misunderstanding. That structure is nothing new, but in the hands of director Ray Lawrence, it’s much more than a stolid, episodic affair.

Working with a screenplay by Andrew Bovell, based on his stage play, Speaking in Tongues, Lawrence weaves back and forth and to and fro in seamless fashion, avoiding contrivance wherever possible to create a suspenseful adult drama driven by the presumptions of its players and the audience.

That equals more than simple misdirection—Lantana is something closer to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia than David Lynch’s seductively salacious Blue Velvet. But it’s no mere copy or even a blending of the two films, with sufficient narrative steam of its own to generate a real kind of interest.

Much of that is circled around the search for the missing woman and the cause of her disappearance, as suggested by the film’s opening sequence. But that turns out to develop in a different way and at a different point in the story than most viewers will expect. And it’s the shattering of expectations across the board that makes Lantana consistently engrossing.

In a nutshell, the plot concerns a Sydney police inspector cheating on his wife, who is a patient of a psychiatrist with issues over her child, a murder victim. The shrink suspects her husband, an emotionally remote professor, of being unfaithful, but here again, not necessarily in the way audiences might expect.

The detective’s mistress, who he met at a dancing class he attends with his wife, is estranged from her husband. Her neighbors, a young couple with three children, also figure into the story.

Best of all, that convincing story doesn’t rely on Hollywood bombast or Playboy-like pictorial compositions to generate its buzz, relying instead on restraint and the intelligence of its audience to keep the wheels moving, which it does without sacrificing entertainment for art-house histrionics.

Highly lauded wherever it was shown, Lantana (so named for the type of foliage prominently displayed in the film) is beautifully shot, acted and scored. It has moments of real terror, insight, deep emotions and a willingness to tackle some thorny issues without feeling compelled to provide all the answers.

#