Lantana (2001)

You change your mind about the quality of some films. I watched Lantana maybe 8 years ago. I found it excruciatingly boring. But now I gave it a second chance and it is as if I am watching another film. Lantana revolves around a few people whose stories are connected in several ways throughout the film. This was maybe the one thing that bothered me, the many connections. Why this hang-up whith coincidences? Is it a cultural thing? Leon is a cop who has an affair with a woman called Jane, who has separated from her husband. Valerie, a psychologist, have issues with herself and her husband, too. These issues which are projected onto her sessions with a gay man who has an affair with a married man. Leon's wife Sonja attends Valerie's treatment, and we get a picture of an unhappy marriage. This is the build-up for a story about infidelity and moral weakness in the sense of temptation but also in the sense of cowardice. The opening scene is dominated by jarring sound of crickets and images of colorful flowers - and a glimpse of a corpse. It has a very elegiac feel to it. This atmosphere is maintained in the film, and it is propulsed both by the restrained soundtrack (which I find unusually sensitive to the images) and the very short, but content-heavy scenes. I would call Lantana a mature film about moral problems. It dodges the overly dramatic and instead it focuses on the inner life of the characters and the relations between them. The dialogues are convincing and some scenes are very beautiful. In one scene, we see Leon, the cop, running. ("Why do you work out?" "I don't want to die.") He runs past suburban houses and neat garden. Suddenly he runs into another jogger and in the next image we see that both of their faces are bleeding. Leon shouts indecencies at the other man. The other jogger is sitting on the ground. He is crying. Leon walks up to him and embraces him. The scene ends. The character of Leon is brilliantly acted. Just watching his face you get to understand how he knows he has fucked things up and he regrets it but does not really want to deal with it. Leon is not portrayed as a symphatetic character, but he is still portrayed as a man who grapples with conscience. Infidelity is dealt with in a way I have rarely seen in other movies, maybe because Lantana, in a very detailed way, portrays the way people become strangers to each other and still they mean a lot to each other. It is not moralizing over ambivalent feelings but deals with it rather honestly. This is a little gem of a film. I didn't expect it to be after having been so bored by it the first time around.