ÃÛÑ¿´«Ã½

A black comedy drama about a tempestuous mother-daughter relationship, "La Spagnola" opens, appropriately enough, with a dust storm. It is 1960, the setting is an isolated house beside an oil refinery in a small Australian town, and fiery Spanish immigrant Lola (Marceli) is hurling colourful abuse at her departing husband.

This storm, both human and elemental, marks the end of the couple's marriage - the unfaithful Ricardo (Palomares) is running off with his blonde Australian mistress and using the family savings to buy a gleaming new car. Lola and her 14-year-old daughter Lucia (Ansara) are left almost destitute.

In response, Lola embarks upon an obsessive, and at times comical, quest for revenge. But it is her clever, ugly duckling daughter, more often than not, who ends up the innocent victim.

Lack of communication is the thread that runs through the film. Mother and daughter are worlds apart. Significantly, Lucia acts as a translator between an Australian doctor and his immigrant patients. But the gulf in understanding between her and her mother is far harder to bridge.

Scripted by actor-turned-writer Anna Maria Monticelli, "La Spagnola" draws upon its author's own experiences as a child of immigrant parents in 60s Australia. Her film's Latin flavour, however, is as much literary and cinematic as personal.

The rumbustious humour, gleefully mixing sex, scatology, and food, resembles Fellini at his most burlesque, while the hints of the surreal and the supernatural recall South American magic realism. Marceli's operatic performance as the self-dramatising Lola suits these moods perfectly, but it is Ansara's quieter, more restrained performance that provides the film's truest moments.

"La Spagnola" is undoubtedly uneven, and its national stereotypes are a little crude. But, at its best, the film is colourful, comic, and often deeply touching.