‘Rikki and Pete’ (R)

The new Australian film "Rikki and Pete" ambles along for what seems to be forever without any sense of mission or destination. And the characters don't seem to mind at all.

They're not idlers, exactly -- just people who move at their own speed. At a guess, Pete (Stephen Kearney) is in his thirties, and he makes his living in Melbourne delivering newspapers. But he's not like every other guy with a paper route; he makes his rounds with a special rig that folds them into paper airplanes and sails them onto his subscribers' front lawns.

His sister Rikki (Nina Landis) is a geologist who moonlights as a sort of soft-country rocker and hasn't quite found herself either. Neither sibling has done much to please Father, who's wealthy but threatens to cut off support. (It's an idle threat; the flow of cash stopped years ago.) There's also a bit of a dispute with a local police officer who, it seems, is the target of some rather tame terrorist attacks that Pete has engineered -- in the character of "Evil Donald" -- as revenge for running down his mom in a pedestrian zone.

When the policeman zeroes in on Peter's alter-identity, brother and sister flee into the wide open Australian spaces in Mom's shiny black Bentley. Eventually they wind up in a dreary mining town, where they link up with a ragtag group of workers, among them a stunning, malapropian Thai woman who becomes Pete's lover.

Up until now, all that we've been given is an assortment of stylishly odd bits of business, jokes and digressions. It's not until Rikki begins taking rock samples to begin her own mine that anything resembling a plot commences. Pete puts his mechanical genius to work by constructing a hydraulic horse, used both for drilling and excavating, and by chopping the Bentley in half and converting it into a truck.

Directed by Nadia Tass, the movie has a sort of woolly affability. This is a bafflingly low-key item; it seems to want to hide its head in the sand. The shapelessness is sometimes irritating, and it would have been great if, near the end, we could have skipped the summing-up fight scene with Dad. But the overall effect is surprisingly fresh and appealing. One thing's for sure; it's certainly nothing you've ever seen before.

"Rikki and Pete" is rated R and contains some nudity, drunkenness and rough language.