Though this film deals with a particular period in Antipodean history – the Black War which saw the near annihilation of Tasmanian Aboriginals – it’s difficult not to feel some resonances now, which for some audiences might be a difficult pill to swallow ( reports of “violently sexist and racist” reactions from the movie’s Venice Film Festival premiere seem to thankfully have been isolated). As well as women and children, Aborginal men and convicts are treated no better.
#The nightingale movie#
The first act brutality is only a taste of things to come in a movie which screams in no uncertain terms of the utter cruelty and entitlement of the British soldiers, who see everything and everyone who isn’t a white male in a position of power as entirely there to serve them and completely expendable after. The Nightingale is long, and it packs a lot in. Indeed, despite the genre leanings of Kent’s first film, The Nightingale has more in common with something like Walkabout, The Road or, perversely, even Green Book, though we are in no way suggesting fans of these films are necessarily likely to also enjoy The Nightingale. By that we mean the violence is not titillating and no one’s going to be punching the air by the end this isn’t an exploitation movie, though it is about exploitation in various forms.
Much has been made of the extreme sexual violence throughout the film – and let us be clear, it is brutal, punishing and frequent – though The Nightingale shouldn’t be mistaken for ‘a rape-revenge film’. Set in 1825 in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), The Nightingale is a tale of colonial violence and hard won revenge as a young Irish convict girl, Clare – played by Aisling Franciosi – who, with her family, suffered an unspeakable attack at the hands of a group of British soldiers – pursues the men through the rough landscape aided by young Aboriginal man Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) who has experienced his own violent injustices. But The Nightingale is somehow more powerful and audacious for it. It’s a willfully uncommercial prospect and it’s impossible to know who the intended audience is. Though it’s been reported that several major studios approached her for big ticket properties, instead she made The Nightingale, a difficult, furious, beautiful and ambitious movie that apologises to no one.
#The nightingale professional#
Franciosi, an Irish-Italian actor who played Lyanna Stark in two episodes in the sixth and seventh seasons of Game of Thrones, and Ganambarr, a professional dancer making his screen debut, both manage to imbue their characters with emotional fragility and unfathomable strength.After the success of her feature debut, the gorgeous, grief-soaked horror The Babadook, all eyes were on what Australian director Jennifer Kent would do next. Like the film itself, their relationship is a slow build, gradually shifting from mutual distrust and resentment to a bond based on shared agony and constant terror. She is aided in the perilous journey by her horse Becky and, more significantly, by Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), an Aboriginal man who associates Clare with the white devils who have brought forth the genocide he has witnessed firsthand. Plotwise, the film is a reworking of the kind of revenge/chase story we’ve seen in films like True Grit and Clint Eastwood’s The Unforgiven, as Clare tromps through the forest primeval to hunt down the officers who raped her and wiped out her family.
But Kent is never showy her choices are always in service to the story and her tormented characters, rather than an act of filmmaking bravura. She makes consistently bold choices-from shooting in a condensed and claustrophobic Academy ratio to creating a soundscape that blurs the terrors of the wilderness with those that exist solely within Clare’s mind.
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