An unusual venture by me into film reviewing. A few days after seeing “Lantana”,  I just sat down and wrote it – actually, this piece seemed to write itself. The title (an apt one) was not mine – it came from The Australian’s Magazine Editor.

TK 20.10.2003  

The Australian (1 February 2002, page 11)

 

“Dancing in the darkness of contemporary Australia”

 

by Tony Kevin

Lantana is a dramatic reflection on the occasional travesty of multi-ethnic society, says Tony Kevin

 

LANTANA explores, in the genre of a mystery thriller, issues of family and society in contemporary Australia. Though not a political movie, it holds a mirror to significant fault-lines in Australian society today.

 

Lantana is most obviously about the stresses of monogamous marriage in contemporary Australia. But, more subtly, the film offers two metaphoric insights into Australia's stressed multiculturalism project.

 

First, Lantana counterposes the exhaustion and nihilistic despair of three different kinds of faltering marriages among well-off Australian couples with the intense loyalty and moral strength of a non-English speaking background migrant marriage.

 

Nik (Vince Colosimo) and Paula (Daniella Farinacci) play a working-class couple who could well be of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern origin. They are certainly “of Middle Eastern appearance”, though neither their ethnicity nor religious background is revealed.

 

In exploring contrasting styles of marriage, Lantana touches on disturbing questions about a middle-class Australian society increasingly disconnected from its traditional family values and institutions, and perhaps becoming less committed to the untidy and expensive business of child-rearing.

 

The second metaphoric dimension of Lantana relates to Australian fears of the foreigner. At a certain point, Nik, the unemployed truckie, in his grimy singlet, transmutes from a cute Mediterranean guy into something potentially far more sinister.

 

Similarly, at a certain point Latin dancing ceases to be a harmless recreational pursuit for jaded couples: it becomes a sexually dangerous, high-risk activity, bringing in its train adultery and possible death.

 

Lantana makes subtle use of several metaphors.

 

Leon (Anthony LaPaglia) is a familiar Sydney type, a beefy working-class cop who, having risen through the ranks, has an affluent inner-city lifestyle. He runs the hilly local streets, trying to ward off a heart attack waiting to happen. Leon is angry and aggressive. He wonders what his life is all about. He takes little joy in his family. His policing style is crude and intimidatory, though it clearly gets results. At the same time, he is trying to find his “inner man” and wondering what happened to the traditional Australia that he grew up in. (Many Australian men will recognise aspects of Leon in themselves; he is an unnervingly sympathetic character.)

 

The emotional life of Leon's wife, Sonja (Kerry Armstrong), is equally out of sync. Their marriage is tired and dispirited. One of their teenage sons has a drug problem and they cannot agree on how to deal with it. Like her husband, Sonja is looking for a new stimulus. She tries to find it -- with a bored Leon in tow -- in a Latin dancing class. She hopes it will be sexy but safe.

 

Leon promptly exploits the situation to embark on a sleazy, secret affair with Jane (Rachael Blake), a separated married woman he meets in the dancing class. Jane's husband has moved out. She is sexually restless, looking to make up for lost time in a predatory pursuit of adventure. Jane isn't too concerned what spin-off damage she might cause to other relationships. She is mostly about her own personal fulfilment. After briefly fancying the raw sexuality of the married Nik, her next-door neighbour, she sets her sights on her guilt-ridden but brawny dancing-class date, Leon.

 

The saddest dysfunctional couple of all are Valerie (Barbara Hershey) and her husband (Geoffrey Rush). High in the socioeconomic tree, they live in a stunning bayside house overlooking Sydney's Pittwater, or the Hawkesbury. But they are haunted by the recent rape and murder of their beloved only child, whose violated body was found in an inner-city laneway.

 

Valerie has tried to exorcise her grief by writing a bestseller. Her emotionally reticent husband, appalled by her public exposure of private grief, has drawn away. She cannot understand why.

 

As the film sets up these interestingly complex and angst-ridden characters, Nik and Paula's manifest domestic happiness is a welcome contrast. The migrant couple initially seem a simple, almost comic, stereotype. Nik is unemployed and restless, minding the three young children at home, while Paula works in a low-wage job to make ends meet. They still have a passion for each other and an uncomplicated sexual code of loyalty that Paula makes quite clear:  “you fool around with other women, I cut your balls off”. Nik understands and accepts these ground rules. The house is chaotically messy, but it's happy and filled with the laughter of emotionally secure children.

 Valerie's disappearance and suspected murder introduces the film's second leitmotif -- the fear of the foreigner. In this, Lantana taps into the spirit of our times: Sydney's recent traumatic fear of Middle Eastern violence. As suspicion focuses on the suddenly sinister Nik, latent prejudices are tapped in the audience.

 

Nik isn't cute anymore. We watch him now through Jane's suspicious eyes and share her growing fear of him. He might well be the killer. When Nik is taken in by police for questioning, Jane -- whose assiduous spying had uncovered Nik's incriminating secret -- takes the children into her care as a distraught Paula tries to convince the police her husband is not a murderer.

 

The police station interrogation scenes resonate with the ugly political reality in Australia, where thousands of Middle Eastern asylum-seekers are being lengthily held and interrogated. Nik and Paula, who thought their modest and law-abiding family lifestyle was secure in ethnically diverse suburban Sydney, suddenly feel very alone and vulnerable. They are the foreigners again.

 

As Jane patronisingly tidies their rumpled house, putting Paula's children into neat order, another metaphor comes to mind: the tragedy of our Aboriginal stolen children.

 

Another crucial image: the lantana weed itself, an imported shrub that, in Sydney's moist and fertile grounds, runs wild, growing into impenetrable thickets of prickly, sour-smelling brambles. The nativist passion to eliminate such foreign botanical infiltrations, detested because they crowd out Australia's native bushland vegetation, neatly symbolises unspoken racial fears.

 

In the final resolution, Nik and Paula survive the threat to their family, but it's no real happy ending for them. Their sense of place and acceptance in Australian society has been seriously damaged. Paula bitterly warns off Jane: “Stay out of our lives from now on.”

 

This deeply hurt family will be slow to trust anybody outside their circle from now on. Their innocence has gone. They have learned that the superficial bonhomie and friendliness of Australian society can be a dangerous illusion.

 

In its subtle way, Lantana says interesting things about the Australia we live in.

 

It's an elegant cinematic reflection of the passionate debates we are living through -- as well as being a most absorbing story.

 

Tony Kevin is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University's research school of Pacific and Asian Studies