MOVIE REVIEW : ‘MY FIRST WIFE’: WHEN LOVE IS A CLOSE SECOND

“We should take more care of how we say goodby.” These are the words of a thoughtful, grieving son after a funeral in “My First Wife” (at the Cineplex Friday), but they are actually the substance of the entire film. With this anguished goodby to a love gone dead, Australian director Paul Cox establishes himself as one of the most powerful and interesting film makers currently at work.

Only one partner falls out of love in this autobiographical film, which the Dutch-born Cox says was born out of “real, true agony.” One partner, unfortunately, is all that it takes.

John (silken-bearded John Hargreaves) has been so preoccupied with his composing and his work as a classical disc jockey and so secure in his notion of the state of his marriage that he hasn’t listened closely to Helen (Wendy Hughes), his elegantly beautiful wife of 10 years.

Not that the rumblings are so apparent. The only child of doting parents who live close at hand in this comfortable, seaside suburb of Melbourne, Helen is a mistress of the smooth surface at all costs. As John curls up beside her for sleep, she echoes his real “I love you very much” with a dutiful, fraudulent, “I love you too.”

Like many another shocked partner, he has no clue how close to the abyss he is. We have, however.

At the opening, we have moved with the camera through this couple’s shingles-and-stained-glass house, blue-purple in the evening light. It is one of those densely packed sequences that are Cox’s hallmarks: an outpouring of classical music; dense, lush photography and a subtle, inquisitive camera. We have noted the framed engravings of the great composers lining the hallway, listened to John’s soothing delivery of his comments on Gluck’s “Orfeo” on his live radio broadcast and then, as Gluck’s Furies reach a peak of emotion, watched Helen reach a similar peak, in bed with another man. We have seen the dissolution of a world in under a minute and a half.

John comes upon the truth soon enough. We are plunged into a man’s-eye view of a separation from a wife and beloved daughter as, by turns, outrage, betrayal and a sense of desolation flood over him. He becomes a flayed, tormented, shameless wreckage--you could be outraged by his excesses of rage and self-pity if his pain weren’t so recognizable, or so universal. (Among “My First Wife’s” three Australian Film Institute awards, one went to Hargreaves for his many-layered, unsparing performance.)

A second story thread underlies the breakup: the last, lingering moments of John’s Russian-born father, around whose hospital bed the whole family takes turn keeping vigil. We see enough of both families to spot the seeds of deep differences: John’s caustic, intellectual father, his mother with an immigrant’s old-country ways; Helen’s upper-middle-class moneyed parents--blustering father and cautiously affectionate mother.

As in his “Man of Flowers,” the world of Cox’s characters is rich in matters of the mind and the spirit. It’s a very European environment in which art and music matter, and good food and conversation are necessary elements. And in the way John has been brought up, family is equally sacred. He is crazy about his sweet 7-year-old daughter (Lucy Angwin); his wife may have to remind him not to neglect her, but the idea of separation from her is intolerable.

The film’s brick wall is that sudden abandonment may be part of the fiber of our lives today, and that fairness has nothing to do with it. Cox, with co-screenwriter Bob Ellis (“Newsfront”), is not much interested in blame or causes so much as in a deep and cautionary portrait. Love comes with no guarantees; take it for granted at your peril.

The writers also have a keen eye for the predatory rush that can come when a man (or woman) becomes separated. Anna Jemison (the wife of “Smash Palace”) plays John’s ultra-sympathetic co-worker at the radio station.

Although Hargreaves’ role is showier, Wendy Hughes is equally fine in a seemingly less sympathetic part. (With this and Cox’s “Lonely Hearts,” and her tour de force in “Careful, He Might Hear You,” Hughes is clearly established as one of Australia’s strongest dramatic actresses.) Helen’s intractability is actually a kind of honesty, although the reasons she gives for leaving are as naggingly unsatisfying as those reasons frequently are. She doesn’t love him anymore, and she hasn’t for a long while.

From this tragic dilemma, Cox has fashioned a penetrating, indelibly memorable film (one is tempted to say exorcism), understandable to anyone who has risked loving to even the smallest degree.

Many of what we find to be Cox regulars contributed to the beautifully special look of “My First Wife”: Yuri Sokol, the superb, Soviet-trained cinematographer, responsible also for “Lonely Hearts” and “Man of Flowers”; Asher Bilu, whose art direction was like another character in “Man of Flowers,” and who works with similar precision here; Tim Lewis, who was the marvelously good editor of both of those films; Jane Ballantyne, Cox’s longtime co-producer; Tony Llewellyn-Jones, the associate producer, and co-scenarist Bob Ellis. His and Cox’s screenplay also won the 1984 Australian Film Institute Award.

‘MY FIRST WIFE’ A Spectrafilm release. Producers Jane Ballantyne, Paul Cox. Director Cox. Associate producer Tony Llewellyn-Jones. Screenplay Cox, Bob Ellis. Camera Yuri Sokol. Art direction Asher Bilu. Editor Tim Lewis. Assistant editor Peter McBain. With John Hargreaves, Wendy Hughes, Lucy Angwin, David Cameron, Julia Blake, Anna Jemison, Charles Tingwell, Betty Lucas, Robin Lovejoy, Lucy Uralov, Jon Finlayson, Ron Falk.

Times-rated: Mature.

Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes.