Lantana

The subtle sounds of sad suburban se

Right at the start, you think you know where Lantana is heading. The camera creeps over a prickly, yellow-leaved shrub, pulling in closer as the sound of insect chirruping grows menacingly loud. We can confidently expect to find something hidden deep in the shrubbery – if not necessarily the traditional severed ear – and sure enough, bingo. Then we cut to a couple having sex in a hotel room, and afterwards, their mundane hunt for her missing earring. Here's a set-up that surely promises routine business – tawdry suburban passions, with malevolence festering under the well-tended hedges.

Well, not quite. This smart, serious Australian drama – it's not really a thriller, not in straight genre terms – gives us all that, but far more subtly than you expect. And the bush that gives the film its name is suggestive less of murky hidden depths than of involuted narrative intricacy.

Some tangle it is too. The lovers in the hotel are Jane (Rachael Blake), a suburbanite separated from her husband, and Leon (Anthony LaPaglia), a weary, confused police detective, barely able to communicate with his increasingly pissed-off wife Sonja (Kerry Armstrong). Sonja has two outlets for her sorrow: a salsa class also attended, as it happens, by Jane; and regular sessions with analyst Valerie (Barbara Hershey), who is also experiencing marital chills with her taciturn husband, John (Geoffrey Rush).

It may not, at first sight, seem entirely plausible that all these people should be tied up in quite the way they are, but director Ray Lawrence and screenwriter Andrew Bovell – on whose stage play Speaking in Tongues this is based – make a point of pushing the chain of coincidence to the extreme. For example: Valerie, out walking, gets rattled with a stranger who happens to be Jane's ex, and who then himself walks into the very bar where Leon is sitting. At another point, Leon literally bumps into a man who later turns out to be ... and so forth.

At first, you mistrust such contrivance; before long, you come to relish it. This is the only clue the film gives to its stage origins: as if there were only a limited number of lead roles available, and everyone, sooner or later, had to play a scene with everyone else. Lantana slyly tricks us into making false assumptions about its characters, but soon we realise that they too are easily prone to jump the gun about each other. We're not, of course, watching a conventional thriller, or a strictly realistic drama, rather a sort of bitter moral comedy, as enclosed and as delicately patterned as an Iris Murdoch novel. In cinema terms, Lantana is perhaps closest to Atom Egoyan's slow-burning jigsaw narratives, such as Exotica, with the characters engaged in a similarly tentative dance in and out of each others' lives.

This is what you might call a very adult film – an epithet invariably applied these days to that school of moody, Oscar-chasing American dramas such as In the Bedroom and Monster's Ball. Lantana, however, shows just how drearily self-important those films can be. Unlike them, Lantana really treats its viewers as grown-ups with minds, and moral discernments, of their own: it never underlines either mood or meaning with broad strokes, and most importantly, it lets its gaps breathe. It gives us the leisure to scratch our heads now and then, or simply lets the silences in the dialogue – the Pinterish pauses, the characters' embarrassed or embittered intakes of breath – convey as much as the words. It's remarkable, for example, that Geoffrey Rush – encouraged by most directors to chew scenery to a pulp – is tantalisingly reserved here, downplaying his part to the point of mutism. We read him as a man with a secret, but the point of his character John, in all his chilly sotto voce spikiness, is that he's not about to blurt out his inner depths to just anyone.

Lawrence makes the most of his actors' reticences. Watch Rachael Blake's use of little quizzical tics and frowns to suggest a woman bristling with precise defence mechanisms, or the way that Barbara Hershey's Valerie quizzes her patients in a vacant, spacey purr, creating an all-over emotional glaze that you just know is bound to crack at some point. The real revelation in the cast is the pike-faced Anthony LaPaglia, an actor who never did much for me until his worldly-wise social outsider in Terence Davies's The House of Mirth. His Leon is a powerful new variation on that stock figure, the tough-cop-on-the-edge – the career detective as a fatigued mess, more uxorious than he knows and chronically ill-at-ease in his skin (an actor's middle-aged barrel girth was rarely so eloquent). There's a wonderful moment where Leon's universal loathing emerges in a line to Rush's character. It must have looked innocuous enough in the script, but, as delivered by LaPaglia, it tells you everything about the kind of man Leon is and the resentment he has stored up against the world: "You're some kind of academic, aren't you?"

There are moments when Bovell's script tells us a little more than we need to know about the film's subject: early on, Valerie over-stresses the word "trust". But overall, Lantana thrives on understatement. Leon complains that his problem is numbness, but, as art-house aficionados know, the more numb and undemonstrative a film appears to be, the deeper the emotional pools it often tends to stir up. Lantana touches on a bitter, everyday pain rarely hinted at in mainstream film; In the Bedroom is a bombastic three-ring circus compared to these moody, subtle soundings. There's a real feeling of moral complexity, too – half the characters are betraying, or snooping on, or snitching on, the others, and yet that's the only way Lantana's wounded souls will reach any sort of reconciliation.

Among absentee directors, Ray Lawrence may not have the enigmatic cachet of a Terrence Malick or a Víctor Erice, but this is certainly a classy return to visibility. He has made only one other feature, and that was 17 years ago – Bliss, based on Peter Carey's novel about a disillusioned ad man going AWOL.

Lantana suggests that Lawrence may, all this time, have been cinema's great lost poet of the mid-life crisis. It's very much about the everyday heaviness of disappointing lives – middle-aged sex has rarely been as emotionally (and in one case, physically) painful on screen as it is here. Lawrence has been busy in commercials since then, but there's none of the dreaded advertising aesthetic here. Rather, he and photographer Mandy Walker go for the finer atmospherics: faces lit up by dashboards on aimless midnight drives, hazy daylight on breakfast tables, or the little glimmers of light through wine glasses, falling on Rush and Hershey's faces. Lantana isn't a film of big, memorable images, more a texture of sly, deep-cutting suggestiveness. A prickly kind of business, indeed, and one of the better surprises of the year.

j.romney@independent.co.uk