Smouldering in suburbia

It begins with the discovery of a corpse. As in the opening of Blue Velvet, the camera noses its way into undergrowth (the Australian Lantana shrub of the title) to the accompaniment of a foreboding soundtrack. The tantalising suggestion is that this is a murder mystery, a serial killer thriller. But the tone shifts and the succeeding scenes are calculated to deceive. At first.

A middle-aged couple are seen coupling noisily. Later, at a salsa class, the man and the woman arrive separately; he goes to his wife, the woman stands around looking discarded, with the secret smile of the adulterer. Gradually, the plot takes shape like a watch being constructed; the cogs are placed in the mechanism - in this case, characters positioned in an anonymous Australian suburb - ready to start ticking. Halfway through the movie it becomes clear that director Ray Lawrence and screenwriter Andrew Bovell (upon whose stage play the script is based) are constructing not a watch, but a time bomb.

Lantana is a mystery thriller where the characters are the plot. Every twitch and nuance of the relationships is etched with deceptive casualness. Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia) is a married cop displaying all the symptoms of an impending midlife crisis. He no longer makes love with his wife, Sonja (Kerry Armstrong), he jogs to the point of exhaustion, he has a fling with a local woman, Jane (Rachael Blake) who is separated from her husband. "It's not an affair," he spits, when she invites further commitment. "It's a onenight stand that happened twice."

Zat's generalised frustration manifests itself in specific acts, including the savage beating of a suspect. And he is not alone in his frustration. He is surrounded by people dealing with loss. It is the thread that links them all. There is the loss of passion between Zat and Sonja, who is secretly seeking psychiatric help from Valerie (Barbara Hershey). Valerie's loss is of a daughter who was murdered (the corpse at the outset); her attempts to deal with it by writing a book alienate her husband (Geoffrey Rush).

Other characters suffer in the margins - Zat's partner, a half-Aboriginal female cop, forlornly hankers after a man who dines alone at her local cafe. The only "happy" couple are a nurse and her unemployed slob of a husband; they and their children coincidentally (and significantly) live next door to the adulterous Jane.

When the psychiatrist disappears one night, the plot clicks into place. Zat investigates and the process draws the threads together into a tight knot. The apparently random accumulation of little jealousies and motives suddenly becomes charged with meaning.

This is a fine, intricate piece of work. Like Robert Altman's Short Cuts or Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, it is a multi-layered tale, whose characters overlap and clash. But Lawrence, who made the rather wonderful Bliss, is less egotistical in his approach and does not impose his will or style on the story. Rather, he allows the actors and the narrative to unfold as if he just happened by with a camera.

It is one of the least showy pieces of directing I have seen recently, and the most effective. It rivals Todd Field's In the Bedroom in terms of quality and the calibre of its acting - and Lantana is less inclined towards melodrama; it does not unfold under the same hovering shadow of doom.

By keeping the material spinning, Lawrence avoids the pitfalls of banlieue depressiveness. The neighbours' contrasting lifestyles are vividly limned - from the ascetic neatness of the childless Jane's house to the raucous clutter of her neighbours' home. Small infestations of humour that lighten the canvas and maintain humanity include the salsa gigolo who can't take women home because he lives with his mother, the painful headon collision between two ageing joggers and the coincidental encounter between Zat and a man in a bar who turns out to be Jane's separated husband.

In this kind of suburb, where people live cheek by jowl, the degrees of separation drop from six to three. Someone, somewhere will be a witness. Deceit will be discovered. If complete trust proves impossible, then an uneasy truce must be maintained.