Saw this movie last night.
It’s an Aussie film and I recommend it highly.
So did you get the impression that the therapist, Valerie (Barbara Hershey), was afraid that her client Patrick (Peter Phelps) was having an affair with her husband John (Geoffrey Rush)? Our group of moviegoers had mixed feelings on the subject.
I thought it was pretty clear that the therapist was worried that her husband was having an affair with the client. And the cops seemed to be thinking that too.
The therapist seemed overly obsessed with her daughter’s death. It turns out her husband was also, but he just expressed it differently.
Yes… yes, I did…
I loved the discussions between Geoffrey Rush and the cop…
Great cinematography and a beautiful soundtrack, too…
That’s what my friends were saying - “Obviously she got the idea the patient was hinting that here husband was unfaithful!” I thought that it was a little far-fetched for a therapist to be that paranoid.
i saw this movie some time ago, when it was released here in sydney. I loved it. It was very australia. It did very well here in awards ect. I have since heard it is not quite as powerful on the small screen.
That storyline with the therapist and geoffrey rush and Peter Phelps was wonderful, i think they captured the nature of paranoia. The audience felt they had deduced, accepted and understood the affair, yet this plotline gradually transformed it into something that only existed inside her mind, and subsequently only existed in the audiences minds. nice subtle idea.
i saw this movie some time ago, when it was released here in sydney. I loved it. It was very australian. It did very well here in awards ect. I have since heard it is not quite as powerful on the small screen.
That storyline with the therapist and geoffrey rush and Peter Phelps was wonderful, i think they captured the nature of paranoia. The audience felt they had deduced, accepted and understood the affair, yet this plotline gradually transformed it into something that only existed inside her mind, and subsequently only existed in the audiences minds, a nice subtle idea.
my second post is far more significant 
Hope it’s okay to bring up this discussion again. I just watched this DVD–liked the movie a lot for the reasons discussed above, but can’t stop wondering how and why Nik was absolved of the murder. Not that I think he did it, but who did? Or how did she die?
MizQuirk, who’s obviously missing something
It’s been awhile since I saw the movie.
Anyway,I thought it was an accidental death, when Valerie fell.
She fell very awkwardly; she was running, in a total panic, in the dark, through brushy, hilly terrain.
Oh, thank you. That’s what I thought too, but it was almost too refreshing to be true that Nik would be believed by the officials.
Miz
Off-topic, but I’m still angry. I liked Lantana quite a bit and was so pleased to see it get the attention it did. I had all my fingers and toes crossed hoping that the success of Lantana (Ray Lawrence’s second film) would bring renewed attention to Ray Lawrence’s FIRST film, the quirky, surreal and extremely moving Bliss (1985, based on Peter Carey’s novel) which has been in my Top 5 favorite films since the first time I saw it in the theater. It’s not out on DVD, and I thought then, wrongly, that it would finally be released on DVD.
Why Bliss has been so ignored all these years is a mystery to me. Why Bliss wasn’t given a 2nd chance on DVD after Lantana’s success (especially since, at roughly the same time, Peter Carey won the Booker Prize for his novel “True History of the Kelly Gang”) is appalling to me. Ok, so maybe no one in America, Canada or Europe wants to release this DVD, but WHAT’S AUSTRALIA’S EXCUSE??? I have a region-free player. I’d buy it from there! What’s going on?
Bliss is the last of my Top 20 Favorite films to be released on DVD. If it didn’t happen a couple of years ago at the peak of the Ray Lawrence/Peter Carey attention, I fear it will never happen.