Cast: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Brandon Walters, Bryan Brown

Director: Baz Luhrmann

He called it his “Red Curtain” style of movie-making, requiring just a few basics: that the audience knows how the film will end when it begins, that the storyline is extremely thin and simple — it’s a heightened, created world — and that there’s dancing or singing to keep the audience involved.

And then he made a departure, with Australia. Baz Luhrmann’s latest film, an epic of three-hour proportions and the costliest film ever made Down Under, is different from his previous works, and in all the wrong ways. You can guess how it will end, only every time we get there, Luhrmann finds another way to keep going; the storyline is thin and simple, but the writer-director keeps finding ways to string it along; Australia is captured in all its vastness and beauty, but is jettisoned in the final moments for war scenes that could have been shot anywhere.

The tragedy is that this is a film that almost fits the bill of what Luhrmann always sets out to do - entertain. As Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman) comes down from England to the Outback chasing her husband who she suspects is up to no good, Luhrmann is at his best. Her incredulity, the sheer difference in the two cultures, as seen in the person of Drover (Jackman), the difficulties and peculiarities of an Australia riven by its own racial divide, and the harshness of nature - the director brings it out effortlessly.

... contd.