Bryan Brown as Frank, Jacqueline McKenzie as Bridget, and Richard E. Grant as Billy in Palm Beach (photograph by Elise Lockwood)

Even Brown is a long way from his usual everyman roles. He plays Frank, the former manager and member of a one-hit-wonder 1970s rock group called the Pacific Sideburns, and more recently the owner of a successful T-shirt company. For his birthday weekend, he and his therapist wife Charlotte (Greta Scacchi) have asked a few friends to stay at their palatial Palm Beach home. The guest list includes the two other surviving Sideburns, journalist Leo (Sam Neill) and ad-man Billy (Richard E. Grant) and their respective wives, Bridget (Jacqueline McKenzie), a younger ex-teacher, and Eva (Heather Mitchell), a one-time screen siren.

Also on hand are some representatives of the younger generation, including Frank and Charlotte’s adult daughter Ella (played by Matilda Brown, Brown and Ward’s actual daughter). Gone but not forgotten is the Sideburns’ female lead singer, whose death in the 1980s led to the end of the band itself, and whose memory seems likely to be at the centre of the present-day drama.

This does not, in fact, occur – and nor, for quite a while, does anything else of major significance. Wine flows, prawns sizzle; the men jostle for position or head off to surf, while the women practise yoga or trade sex tips. Political issues are not up for discussion, and a couple of the would-be comic moments – especially Charlotte’s brutal treatment of a former patient – convey a disconcerting contempt for the great unwashed.

Matilda Brown as Ella in Palm Beach (photograph by Elise Lockwood)

Disconcerting too, in a 2019 film, is the absence of even a token nod to ‘diversity’: every character of consequence is white, middle-class, and heterosexual, as far as we can tell. It seems possible that Ward is setting us up for a fall, reinforcing a complacency that will ultimately be undermined, but while a few personal secrets do eventually come to light, it is hard to understand them as carrying any broader social implications.

Most of the visible angst belongs to the men: Leo emerges as easily the most interesting character, Neill’s stiff body language and faraway gaze hinting at pain that the film cannot quite account for explicitly. As for Frank, he has been an erratic husband and a generally unsatisfactory father, and has failed to fulfill his artistic ambitions, whatever they might have been. He regrets selling his business, relies on anti-depressants – something he cannot admit to his wife – and is, by his own admission, impotent. Even as all this is brought to light, none of it is given enough weight to risk undermining the premise that he and his friends are living the good life on the whole.

Again, all this is a far cry from Thoms’s Palm Beach. Still, the two films side by side do leave the impression that Australian gender politics have not changed that much over the past forty years. Men are little boys, maintaining their petty rivalries to the end; women are more contented and mature, even if doomed to spend their lives catering to male whims. On this front, Palm Beach is a bit like Sex and the City for women who have stuck with marriage over the long haul, and who fantasise not just about material comfort but about the hope that their emotionally absent blokes might suddenly wake up to themselves, apologise for their bad behaviour, and vow to mend their ways. That, you might say, is aspirational with a vengeance.

Palm Beach (Universal) is directed by Rachel Ward and is in cinemas August 8.