Lantana (15)

Love will tear us apart

There's something nasty in the bushes. The camera, delving through the tangled and thorny undergrowth of the shrubs that give the film its title, eventually alights upon a woman's corpse, face down in the starfish position, a wedding ring visible on her left hand. The identity of the dead woman and of the person who might have left her there constitute the troubled heart of Lantana, Ray Lawrence's splendidly intelligent and engrossing movie, already decorated in his native land with seven Australian Film Institute awards, including Best Film and Best Director. They are richly merited.

At a time when many films can't master one genre, Lantana melds two, and in such an oblique and involving way that you hardly notice the seams. The key to its dual identity resides in the character of Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia), a bearish-looking police detective with a bear's temper. Unhappy in his marriage to Sonja (Kerry Armstrong), he's been playing away with a single woman, Jane (Rachael Blake) he met at his salsa class. "It's about sex," his dance instructor reminds him, speaking truer than he knows.

But even his affair can't raise Leon from his mid-life trough, and he lashes out – at a recalcitrant suspect, at his dope-smoking teenage son, at a bloke he collides with head-on while out jogging. (He wears a cut across his nose like Jake Gittes in Chinatown.) The pains he's been getting in his chest are just something extra fate has thrown in, a memento mori to cheer him on his way.

There's more crooked marital timber in the shape of John Knox (Geoffrey Rush) and Valerie Somers (Barbara Hershey), haunted by the murder of their 12-year-old daughter two years earlier, and now estranged by their grief. Valerie is a psychotherapist, and the more one sees of her at work with patients, the more we wonder exactly who the physician is trying to heal. When she asks Sonja whether she still loves her husband she might just as well be posing the question to herself. But more disconcerting is Patrick (Peter Phelps), a gay patient who tells her of an affair he's been having with a married man, and by his insinuating manner prompts her to suspect that the man in question is her own husband: "Some women like to live the lie – it's easier than dealing with the truth."

The script, adapted by Andrew Bovell from his stage play Speaking in Tongues, recalls Altman's Short Cuts in its braiding of unsuspected connections, and in its air of foreboding a little of Atom Egoyan's brilliant jigsaw Exotica. When a woman disappears in mysterious circumstances Leon is assigned the case, and gradually finds pieces of his own life turning up with the evidence.

Some may feel the plot stacks the coincidences a shade too tightly, but it's worth it just to hear Leon's reaction when his police partner (Leah Purcell) stops the car at the house of a witness they are to interview – the house belongs, of course, to Jane, the woman he's been having an affair with. "This could be tricky," he says grimly. There's painful comedy here inasmuch as Leon, a nice guy, knows there's a link between his being an awful husband and a bad cop – and that right now he can't do a thing about either of them. "How do you want to play this?" he asks Jane sotto voce as they prepare for questioning. "You're the professional," she deadpans. "Maybe you should just do your job."

As Leon, Anthony LaPaglia carries the brooding tenor of the film in his bunched shoulders and furtive glances. He's an actor I never thought I could forgive, let alone admire, after his dreadful turn as Daphne's "English yob" brother in Frasier, but he does good, serious work here, adrift between quiet misery and thundering rage. (He had the same undercurrent of violence in Steve Buscemi's Trees Lounge.) The casting is first rate in the other main roles; not just Barbara Hershey and Geoffrey Rush, but two actors previously unknown to me – Kerry Armstrong gives a beautifully restrained performance as Leon's betrayed wife Sonja, her composure under the strain of her husband's moody silences only wilting behind the closed door of the therapist's study. "I like being this age. I like the lines around my eyes," she says, adding: "I don't know if he does." That line is a heartbreaker. And admire too the choice of Rachael Blake as Jane, not the nubile bit of skirt the mid-life-crisis man usually chases, but an unexceptional-looking woman who has a failed marriage behind her and a vista of loneliness in front.

What the film does rather cleverly is to dovetail its vision of marital estrangement with the endgame of the murder mystery. Jane's discovery of a discarded shoe in the bushes apparently implicates her friend and next-door neighbour Nik (Vince Colosimo), who may have picked up the vanished woman in his truck late one night. His guilt, as Jane sees too clearly, would be hideously ironic, Nik being to all appearances a devoted father of three young children, and his relationship with Paula (Daniella Farinacci), as we can see, being the only decent advertisement for marriage in the whole picture. (Or is their happiness to do with being a sufficient distance from middle age?)

Ray Lawrence, who also directed the film of Peter Carey's Bliss several years ago, waits and reveals with the timing of a good poker player, stumbling only once at the close with a montage that's too pat and sentimental. A more enigmatic or ambiguous ending would have better suited its mood, and made us wonder what might issue from these damaged lives. But this won't undermine a film of gripping and memorable accomplishments.