![]() There are sentimental and reassuring movies about vengeance, and comforting stories about the resistance to historical oppression. This is a difficult movie because the questions it raises are not easy. We can’t look away from Clare, from what happens to her or what she sees. The screen is a tight almost-square, and Franciosi’s face often occupies it in confrontational close-up. The length of the movie can feel oppressive - the chase is grinding, its resolution repeatedly deferred - and Kent’s shooting style is deliberately claustrophobic. Though “The Nightingale” is an effective history lesson, it is even more powerful as an ethical inquiry into the consequences of violence and the nature of justice. But there isn’t much danger of misunderstanding. Occasionally they utter programmatic statements that seem meant to instruct the audience in the meaning of the ordeal we are witnessing. Their political education in the necessity of anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal resistance happens in fits and starts, and sometimes in ways that feel a little obvious. English is neither one’s mother tongue, which is both a sign and a source of potential solidarity. Hawkins is a monster, but hardly an anomaly, and his increasingly sadistic behavior reveals the true face of British authority.īilly and Clare slowly evolve toward an understanding of their common status as outsiders. The whites are engaged in a genocidal campaign that justifies itself as a counter-insurgency. Tasmania is in a state of war between what Billy calls “white fella” and “black fella,” a conflict waged without mercy or morality. “The Nightingale” is a movie thick with horror and heavy with feeling. The long middle of the film switches back and forth between the unlikely hunters and their unwitting quarry, using their mishaps and chance encounters to cast a hard, sharp light on the racial, sexual and class violence that are central, in Kent’s account, to the founding of modern Australia. ![]() Not that anyone would take them for a posse in pursuit of an officer and his retinue. She keeps him in the dark about the true purpose of their journey. ![]() For much of their journey, she addresses Billy as “boy,” treating him as a servant or worse even as her survival and sanity depend on him. (Hawkins, worried that his promotion is in jeopardy, is on his way there with several of his men.) She also hires an Aboriginal guide named Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), since the trackless forests are too dense and dangerous for a white woman to navigate on her own.Ĭlare’s place in the Tasmanian social hierarchy places her above Billy just as surely as it ranks her below Hawkins and his soldiers, and she treats her new companion with high-handed, racist condescension. Without much hope of finding justice through official channels - a magistrate vaguely promises to file a report of some kind - she takes matters into her own hands, setting out for Launceston with a rifle and a horse.
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