GABRIEL Byrne and Laura Linney star in this Australian drama based on Raymond Carver's story 'So Much Water Close to Home'. Carver's spare prose is thickened with an outback killer, marital histrionics and simmering racism. But unlike the tightly-wound Lantana, director Ray Lawrence's deft blend of thriller and domestic drama, Jindabyne unspools untidily. Again, Lawrence throws in a dead body and watches the domestic disharmony stew.

Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) and Claire (Laura Linney) endure a strained marriage in a small Australian town called Jindabyne. When Stewart discovers the overturned body of an Aboriginal woman floating in the water on a fishing trip, he and his friends wait a few days to report it. They net fish while the body lies tethered to the bank.

Later the men are pilloried for their crass behaviour, and Claire shoulders the guilt and the implied racism. Their marriage takes a tumble.

Gabriel Byrne is a taciturn, troubled lug. Laura Linney's Claire is a fevered mix of unspoken feelings, desperate in her attempts to set things right.

There is great skill in the way Lawrence conveys the reticent emotions that fuel the domestic disharmony. But the film loses focus: it intermittently alerts a sense of menace, and then reverts back to the domestic drama, seemingly not bothered about the killer lurking in the backgound.

The Family Friend
(Paolo Sorrentino): Giacomo Rizzo, Laura Chiatti, Gigi Angelillo, Clara Bindi.
Running time: 108 minutes.
. . .

ITALIAN director Paolo Sorrentino's films hum with the high-aesthetic melodrama of an expensive TV ad. But his stories are low-key: fanciful affairs about men who can't connect with life.

The contrast worked beautifully in The Consequences of Love, Sorrentino's 2004 drama/thriller about a mafioso accountant entombed in silence in a hotel. The Family Friend expands the eccentricity but to diminished affect: it's a tale of comeuppance a la The Magnificent Ambersons, but modified with Fellini-esque surreality and Antonioni angles.

The central character is a wonderful, nasty piece of work:

Giacomo Rizzo stars as Geremia de Geremei, an aged miser and wealthy loanshark who feeds off his local community and travels with plastic bag in hand. He lives in squalor with his bedbound mother and slimes pathetically after young women. As in The Consequences of Love, it takes a siren to smash up his world . . . in the form of Rosalba (Laura Chiatti), a bride he forces into sex to lower the interest rate on a wedding loan. But he gets more than he bargained for.

It is an amusing yarn and very distinctive, but I never felt for this horrible little man . . . which eventually you are supposed to do.

Sorrentino's loping camera is a character in itself, mocking those who won't engage in life. But it's an excessive affair. There is a great director inside Sorrentino waiting to break out, but he needs to tame his stylistic indulgences first.