Down Blunder

Australia1 starDirector: Baz LuhrmannWith: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Brandon Walters, David Wenham165 mins, cert 12A

Something strange happened to my face shortly after the beginning of Baz Luhrmann's excruciating new wartime romance epic, starring Nicole Kidman as the posh English Lady Sarah who travels out to Australia in 1940, and Hugh "Russell Crowe is not available" Jackman as the bit of local rough with whom she falls swooningly in love. A kind of clinical shock caused the upper part of my body to go into a state of paralysis. The skin on my face became as tense and inert as Kidman's forehead. My whole face was as taut as a snare drum, or the back of a saddleback pig. The roof of my mouth became locked as I tried to give a traumatized whinny of distress: "Nggg ... ngggg ..." Right back at me came Kidman's English accent: "Eauu maah-eye Gord, th-eauu-se cahh-tle are escayyy-ping acrawss thuh bil-ah-bongggg."

At war's outbreak, Lady Sarah furiously suspects her absent husband is getting some extracurricular jollies on the family's cattle station in Australia, although her emotional state has to be inferred from the dialog, rather than from Kidman's immobile face, in which the only discernible movement is a faint pursing of the mouth and a quiver of that retroussé nose, perhaps induced by two tiny invisible electrodes being jabbed into her lips below the nostrils. She impulsively travels out there - quite a quick journey, evidently - to the impotent dismay of various servants and submissive salaried flunkies. Turns out her husband has been killed as a result of a creepy conspiracy by white monopolists to bankrupt her business, and a preternaturally wise Aborigine called King George, played by David Gulpilil, has been fitted up for the murder.

Imperious and adorable, Lady Sarah announces she wants to drive her cattle billions of miles across the CGI Outback to market anyway, to the exasperation of her hairy stockman, Drover, played of course by Hugh "Russell Crowe's fee was just that bit too high" Jackman. As they encounter all sorts of tempests and setbacks, love inevitably flowers between Nicole Kidman and Hugh "Russell's agent was frankly unreasonable on the phone" Jackman.

They are accompanied by Nullah (Brandon Walters), a young mixed-race boy of the sort the Australian authorities notoriously used to insist on spiriting away to conceal the evidence of sex between the races. The grotesque condescension of making the only important Aborigine character a child would rather seem to underline the racists' repeated declarations that the Aborigines are just children. But Luhrmann is always mustard-keen to accord his Aborigine characters their own narrative of cultural identity. "The only thing you really own is your story," says Drover solemnly - which is quite something, as Luhrmann pinches almost everyone else's story. Gone With the Wind, Out of Africa, The African Queen, Empire of the Sun and many others get nicked. The characters also go to see The Wizard of Oz, because the last word of that title is slang for a certain antipodean country, geddit? The score, moreover, offers variations on Waltzing Matilda, Sheep May Safely Graze and - to accompany Nullah's ecstatic embrace of his Aboriginal identity - Elgar's Nimrod.

Cattle-related adventures satisfactorily concluded, Kidman embarks on a blissful but tragically short period of quasi-marital happiness with Hugh "Russell's putting on weight anyway" Jackman. But then their relationship is thrown into crisis when the Japanese attack. With an awful inevitability, the hero and heroine are saved by the aged wisdom of King George, who is often seen in long shot: part of, and effectively indistinguishable from, the awesome digital landscape. King George is pretty damn useful with that spear of his, and in the film's final moments, despite having been arrested, he chucks it to great effect - how very fortunate the authorities neglected to take it off him. Perhaps they were culturally sensitive enough to realise it was part of his "story".

The zappy, hyperactive cuts and zooms that are so much a part of Luhrmann's style melt away as the solemnity of the film sets like concrete. We are left with slow-moving insincerity and conceit, summoned up in the flatulence of that title: Australia, a country reborn in terms of facetious Hollywood cliches. The film seems to mark the moment when the white man's burden of colonial condescension passed from Britain to the United States. All this Australia offers is a cringe, but not a very cultural one.

This week's other films

With Gardens in Autumn (3 stars), as so often in the past, Otar Iosseliani has made a delicately flavored, gentle, charming movie, with a characteristic surreal tinge, about what happens to us when the perpetual distraction of work is removed from our field of vision. Séverin Blanchet plays a minister in the French government who has the traditional trappings and prerogatives of power: a huge official car and residence, and even an attractive mistress (Muriel Motte), although he is not a married man, having broken up with his fiancee. A catastrophic series of strikes and demos is blamed on him - though the political process by which this happens is not shown - and the minister is forced to resign. After this, he can cultivate the joys of leisure, a little bittersweet, perhaps, but no less delightful for happening late in life: these are the gardens in autumn.

But is the film really about the sudden shift from the frantic workaday world to a time of sweet idleness? Well, not exactly. The minister's post-retirement existence seems hardly less eventful than when he was employed. Or, to put it another way, his quirky life as a minister seems hardly less desultory than the time spent kicking his heels in parks, cafes and in the street. He spends some time with his mother, played weirdly in drag by Michel Piccoli: an unreadable piece of drollery. There are odd outdoor scenes, perhaps inspired by Edouard Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, a punch-up between ex-servicemen, a jungle cat kept as a pet - but no very obvious distinction between work and play, except for one hilarious moment when he has a bash at roller blading. The whole movie is inherently playful, like a farce taken at flâneur pace, and very likable.

There is something very English about Mum & Dad (3 stars), a macabre horror film, apparently inspired by the Fred and Rose West case, though if the dialogue were in German, I suppose I would think it was very Austrian. Writer-director Steven Sheil does a great deal with very little. Olga Fedori plays a Polish cleaner at Heathrow, who comes to stay at a creepy rundown place in the eerie industrial wasteland surrounding the airport. This is the domain of "Mum" and "Dad", played by Dido Miles and Perry Benson, who have a horrifying secret. I'm increasingly squeamish about horror, but this is an ice-cool film and Sheil is a smart operator.

Asif Kapadia's Far North (3 stars) is an intriguing, disturbing and fiercely uncompromising tale of survival and love; it ends with a flourish of horror that would not disgrace Thomas Harris. Michelle Yeoh and Michelle Krusiec play Saiva and Anja, two women moving across a freezing wasteland, swaddled in furs. The terrain is hostile and the women are evidently in danger of assault by soldiers. Where are they, exactly? When is this supposed to be happening? It is an eerily stateless, ahistorical landscape. The two women befriend Loki (Sean Bean) and, fatefully, begin to vie for his affections. It is one of the most purely atmospheric movies of the year - and very original.

As co-producer and star of Bedtime Stories (2 stars), Adam Sandler has made a cold, shrewd, almost actuarial decision about what keeps his box-office dollars up. People like to see him act opposite little kids. Here, he plays Skeeter, the laid-back maintenance man at a huge, soulless hotel - which was once a sweet family motel run by Skeeter's old dad, played by Jonathan Pryce. His sister has gone away, leaving Skeeter to mind the kids; he entertains them with bedtime stories that come true. Russell Brand plays Skeeter's best friend. There's a surface liveliness to the movie, but it has that plasticky Disney quality and lack of real heart.

The wacky bestselling memoir by British author Danny Wallace has been transformed into Yes Man (2 stars), a high-concept rom-com starring Jim Carrey, playing Carl, a guy who has been depressed since his wife left him. But then an old acquaintance drags him along to see a charismatic life coach, played by Terence Stamp, who tells him to say "Yes" to everything. In a state of desperation, Carl agrees to the experiment. It takes him on a wild and crazy journey that leads to stormy love with quirky Zooey Deschanel. Sort of ho-hum stuff, but nice to see a cameo from Rhys Darby, from TV's Flight of the Conchords.