Lantana: 'What holds your marriage together?'

Interesting use of contrast – John tells the truth, Zat lies about cheating on his wife – but Zat is supposed to be the one who is seeking the truth.

Lantana synopsis

In the midst of a midlife crisis, detective Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia) investigates the disappearance of a prominent psychiatrist, Dr Valerie Somers (Barbara Hershey). Zat suspects her husband John Knox (Geoffrey Rush) of having had a homosexual affair with Patrick Phelan, one of her patients (Peter Phelps). Zat discovers his wife Sonja (Kerry Armstrong) was also a patient. Suspicion then falls on a young unemployed man, Nik Daniels (Vince Colosimo), when a neighbour, Jane O’May (Rachael Blake) reports him. All these lives begin to unravel under the pressure of suspicion.

Lantana curator's notes

After his brilliant debut film, Bliss (1985), based on a novel by Peter Carey, director Ray Lawrence spent 15 years trying to get finance for his second film. Several projects failed before he got to make Lantana, but the film did not disappoint – it was a critical and popular success.

Lantana is distinctly different to most contemporary Australian films – sparser, darker, more emotionally mysterious. Sydney is not shown as the beautiful sunny city we’re used to. It’s an urban drama about degrees of trust, with a large ensemble cast, and an utterly serious tone. Andrew Bovell’s script, adapted from his own play, uses coincidence to connect a series of characters who are seemingly unconnected, but going through similar crises of life. The film is partly about the messiness of real relationships, the way that emotions spill over between work, home and leisure. LaPaglia’s detective, for instance, carries his frustrations about home to work with him; Barbara Hershey’s psychiatrist, who’s grieving for a murdered daughter, lashes out at a stranger on the street.

The name of the film confused audiences overseas – and some at home. Lantana is in fact a weed – a thick bush, hard to get rid of, but with a beautiful flower. ‘Once you go past that,’ said Lawrence, ‘it’s all thorns’.

Notes by Paul Byrnes

Education notes

This clip shows an exchange between John Knox (Geoffrey Rush) and Detective Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia), who is investigating the disappearance of John’s wife, Valerie Somers. When Leon questions John about his whereabouts on the night of Valerie’s disappearance, John responds by asking Leon if he has ever cheated on his wife and what holds his marriage together, unwittingly confronting Leon with his own infidelity and troubled relationship. The conversation takes place on the treetop balcony of John’s house, in a bush setting.

Educational value points

• This clip from Lantana provides an example of the way director Ray Lawrence constructs 'scenes that appear to suggest one perspective or one primary goal, only to spin that expectation around’ (Freeman, http://www.sensesofcinema.com). What begins as an interrogation of John turns into a cross-examination of Leon and his marriage, as John, through his responses, unwittingly probes Leon’s fragile relationship and his precarious sense of self.

• In this scene, Leon lies rather than admit his infidelity, in order to project an image of the sort of man and husband he would like to be. However, this projection is undermined by the incongruity between what he says and how he acts. For example, there is a long pause as he struggles to respond to John’s question about what holds his marriage together, and he hesitates and looks down as he denies cheating on his wife.

• John and Leon, as the clip shows, are linked by marriages in which betrayal has led to a loss of trust – a central theme of the film. They are also linked by grief, which for John is brought about by the loss of his daughter and his marriage, and which for Leon is a result of placing his own marriage in jeopardy. While John cannot resurrect his damaged relationship, the exchange between the two men serves as a warning to Leon, causing him to reflect on what he has lost in his marriage.

• By cutting between individual close-ups of Leon and John so that they are visually separate, the clip underlines their sense of isolation. This is reinforced by their physical disengagement, so that even when Leon and John are shown together in the same shot, John turns his back or one of them looks away. Lawrence uses this technique throughout Lantana to suggest that, in spite of their intertwining lives, the characters do not connect.

• Reaction shots are close-ups that are used in film to reveal a character’s thoughts or emotions or to indicate the importance of a certain response. An example from the clip is the quick close-up of Leon as he struggles to respond to John’s question about cheating on his wife. This, and his downcast gaze as he denies being unfaithful, reveal that both the question and the lie make him uncomfortable.

• Andrew Bovell, an award-winning playwright and screenwriter, adapted the script for Lantana from his play Speaking in Tongues. It received an Australian Film Institute (AFI) Award for Best Screenplay Adapted from Another Source. Bovell says that adapting the play meant 're-inventing’ the story: he introduced new characters, cut the more bizarre coincidences that connected the two couples in the play, and removed the stylised dialogue that had different characters repeating the same lines.

• Geoffrey Rush, who plays John Knox in the film, is one of Australia’s most respected actors. He established himself as a theatre actor before his performance in the role of pianist–composer David Helfgott in Shine (1996) won him an Academy Award for Best Actor. Since then he has worked extensively both in Australia and overseas, appearing in films such as Elizabeth (1998), Ned Kelly (2003), Munich (2005) Candy (2006) and the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy.

• Anthony LaPaglia received an AFI Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role for the role of Leon Zat in Lantana, which many critics regard as one of his best performances. LaPaglia moved to the USA in the 1980s where he established himself as a character actor, often playing the 'tough guy’ or cop. He has appeared in a number of Australian films, including Looking for Alibrandi (2000) and The Bank (2001), and is well known to audiences as the lead in the popular US television crime drama Without a Trace (2002–).

• Director Ray Lawrence is not a prolific filmmaker, gives actors a lot of artistic freedom and often relies on one 'take’. His films explore universal themes with a distinctly Australian language, idiom and setting. Lantana won seven AFI awards, including Best Film and Best Direction and was the long anticipated follow-up to Lawrence’s first film Bliss (1985), based on Peter Carey’s novel of the same name. Lawrence released his third feature, Jindabyne, in 2006. He also works as a director of television commercials.

Education notes provided by The Learning Federation and Education Services Australia