I ANGUISHED about a third star for PJ Hogan’s feminism-focused comedy, where ambitious Gold Coast mayoral candidate (Anthony LaPaglia) commits Shirley (Rebecca Gibney) the loopy mother of his five daughters and installs quirky hitchhiker Shaz to nanny them.

Sounds familiar? Toni Collette. Local government. Coastal town. Hogan used those and other familiar ingredients in “Muriel’s Wedding”, top Aussie comedy with social bite that also projected Collette to the front rank of the acting profession.

“Mental” has good, small moments when its women – young and old – must confront mental health issues. Shaz exposes the five daughters to fresh lifestyle possibilities, taking the mickey out of middle-class neighbours, showing herself as a force for women’s rights and concealing a tough personal agenda. At the psychiatric hospital, Shirley and Sandra (Deborah Mailman, always wonderful) join Shaz to form a sisterhood to be reckoned with.

In fact, while stresses of life may have weighed heavily on that trio, Hogan’s screenplay holds back on inflicting them with genuine mental illnesses.

“Mental” is not well crafted. That may not bother people who expect clever comedy, but what I consider the film’s best moment when Shaz uses the last uncleared linguistic obstacle in cinematic edginess to describe one of the middle-class ladies. Not once but several times, with admirable vigour. The word has been spoken before, but this time it drew an audible gasp of audience surprise.

The second-best, which has encountered some adverse comment in tabloid print media elsewhere, is a sequence involving Shaz asking Nancy Next-door (Kerry Fox) to find sanitary protection for the five daughters. The sequence is bold about its subject rather than unpleasant, a truth of life that, while not needing emphasis, fits in with the film’s underlying concerns. These children need a mother for more than cooking and laundry!

 At all cinemas