Antony LaPaglia and Kerry Armstrong star in "Lantana".

An award-winning Australian film which weaves a web of four marriages.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 09 August 2002

KIRSTY WARK:
Well, let's find out what the Australian at the table is thinking. Did this captivate you? Did it make you think you were learning something about relationships in middle age?

GERMAINE GREER:
No, to tell you the truth.

KIRSTY WARK:
Why not?

GERMAINE GREER:
Well. One of the problems with it for me is that it has no cinematic dimension. It's actually not a film. It's a soap opera. And it's like Neighbours, with screwing.

So we start off with what looks like bad sex and we get three more episodes, or something, of people grinding and snorting. I couldn't believe the plot.

It's a tissue of coincidence that's wound up so tight that in the end the joke is on the audience. Because we think, "Ah, Patrick has to be the lover of so and so," and then we get told, "Wrong." We thought coincidence was the medium.

KIRSTY WARK:
But you're not expecting real life are you? You're not expecting heightened reality. You're not expecting it to have strange coincidences, are you?

GERMAINE GREER:
It has too many of them. I mean, the new husband walks into a pub in Sydney, and guess what! His ex-wife is there.

Do you know how many pubs there are in Sydney? Do you know what the odds are of that happening? Somehow they're all in each other's pockets all the time.

EKOW ESHUN:
It's really interesting. Germaine says two things. One, she says it's too realistic and drab and then she says it's not realistic enough.

GERMAINE GREER:
I never said realistic. Did you hear me use such an expression.

EKOW ESHUN:
For me it's about some of the nuances of life. It's about the dishonesties and lies. It's about the ways that real life is full of complexity and how love is never straightforward. How everyone in the relationship carries with them a set of lies and dishonesties.

KIRSTY WARK:
In the marriage, there is only one where the husband and wife are still young and they're the only ones that touch each other and talk to each other and don't have a huge complication.

There are things, I imagine, to lots of marriages, dialogue that comes out here that is quite believable.

JOHN GRAY:
I think it's a very stylish and accomplished film. I didn't lose concentration watching it. I found it interesting.

But it's a bit like a Chinese box with nothing at the very centre. The human context seems to me to be extraordinary banal. It's the torpid malaise of bored people.

GERMAINE GREER:
It's Neighbours. It is.

EKOW ESHUN:
I'd say you're missing the point. I'd say it's a more subtle film that you give credit for. It's a ripple effect. Small things that happen at the beginning have resonance all the way through.

Which is also to say that life is full of undertones. It's all about the dynamic between all these people. The unseen dynamic between them all, because they have no idea the effect they have on each other.

KIRSTY WARK:
But did it not seem to you like - as soon as I read the notes that originally it was a play, you could see it much more as a play than in the cinema.

EKOW ESHUN:
Yes, in a way. But it's really, really well directed and edited. So you have this illusion between all these people and forces. You're forced to look at the world through these people's lives.

KIRSTY WARK:
Is that the banality of life?

JOHN GRAY:
If you take away the thrill of the film, which is the dimension, it's just the acting. I think Barbara Hershey is very good.

KIRSTY WARK:
LaPaglia is a lot better in this film than anything else I've seen him in.

JOHN GRAY:
But if you take away all that, what do you have but four bored couples.

EKOW ESHUN:
The point is that everyone is dishonest, but what we see is the honesty of their dishonesty.