52 Films by Women Vol 4. 38. THE NIGHTINGALE (Director: Jennifer Kent)
When a film director has a success in one genre, there is
pressure to stick to it. For her second feature, Australian writer-director
Jennifer Kent has audaciously and successfully followed her 2014 horror film, The
Babadook with The Nightingale, a colonial era rape,
murder and revenge drama in which two very different oppressed individuals are
joined on a quest that will lead either to retribution or their own certain
deaths.
Set in the 1820s Tasmania (known then as Van Diemen’s Land),
a small island the size of Denmark, it charts the injustice meted on Irish
convict, Clare (Aisling Franciosi), the nightingale of the title, on account of
her singing voice. She is the employ of Hawkins (Sam Claflin), an ambitious but
under-rewarded army lieutenant, who is seeking a recommendation for a
captaincy. Clare has served her time and needs a letter of recommendation to be
declared a free woman. However, Hawkins thinks of Clare as his property,
compensation for a joyless, unmarried life and three years in the bush where
only one was promised. Although Clare is married to Aidan (Michael Sheasby) and
has a baby daughter, he pleasures himself with her after a performance for a
visiting officer (Ewen Leslie), leaving scratch marks about her neck. Aidan
demands the letter, is refused and gets drunk. That night, he confronts Hawkins
and embarrasses him. The visiting officer won’t recommend him, forcing Hawkins
to travel north with two junior officers, the coarse but cowardly Ruse (Damon
Herriman) and young Jago (Harry Weaving-Greenwood, son of the actor Hugo Weaving)
who has only been in Van Diemen’s Land for two months, to plead his case in
person. Before the evening is out, the three men pay a visit to Aidan and Clare’s
hut. Clare is raped twice, Aidan is shot dead and the baby is fatally silenced
having been thrown by Jago against the hut wall. To ‘finish it off’, Clare is stunned
with a rifle butt to her head. She awakens to the next day to a scene of
carnage, which haunts her dreams throughout the ensuring drama.
The Nightingale is not, to be sure, a pleasant watch, but it
has a clear purpose: to depict the unremitting failure of England’s attempt to
tame the Australian bush by subjugating ‘the black fellas’, the Aboriginals who
cleared the land in their own way and were forced out by sheep farmers who knew
nothing of the traditions that preceded it. Clare teams up with Billy (Baykali
Ganambarr) her reluctant guide to intercept Hawkins before he reaches
Launceston, a town five days trek away. Billy does not believe anything the
white devils tell him – and with good reason – but is an accomplished guide.
His ‘uncle’ Charlie (Charlie Jampijimpa Brown) is leading Hawkins and his group
– men pushing the wagon include two silent older men and a self-reliant orphan,
Eddie (Charlie Shotwell) who Hawkins takes under his wing, if only as a
criticism of Ruse and Jago; he offers to teach the boy to read and to fire a
pistol, and congratulates him at one point for saving a barrel of rum.
Whenever Clare comes across white fellas, Billy is nowhere
to be seen. ‘You’re supposed to protect me,’ she complains. ‘No, I’m supposed
to guide you, he replies, ‘can’t do that if I’m dead!’ Clare initially refers
to him as boy and points a rifle at him. However, after losing their food after
an encounter with a slaver, Clare appreciates his worth. She goes against his
advice in trying to cross a raging river. Having first led the horse to shore,
Billy saves her with an outstretched stick.
There is no sentimentality in Kent’s approach, but there is
a grudging appreciation of the other, notably when Clare exclaims that she
hates the English as much as Billy and lapses into Gaelic. Hawkins has no truck
with remorse. It is easier for him to shoot than to listen to pleading voices.
Claflin doesn’t play him as a caricature. Hawkins has his own sense of
grievance and generally feels that what happens in country stays there. Clare
will later tell him that she is a ghost, but Hawkins is the real ghost of a
human being here, dehumanised by army service.
Both Charlie and Billy have their own agendas. For Billy, he
wants to be reunited with his people – he makes an unpleasant discovery.
Charlie wants to confront Hawkins with his own ambition – for it to mock the
lieutenant.
Before she sets on her quest, Clare is told ‘there’s a war
on’. This is viewed in semi coherent sequences: a thatched building that is set
alight and watched by a young woman and her children; a house where two white
people are killed in their beds. When men are doing their jobs – and women too
– they exercise no compassion. As couples, they offer the vestige of decency. A
couple pass Clare on the street and almost take pity on her, until she laughs
deliriously. Another couple offer her a ride and make a gesture to Billy that
releases his emotion – but (again) not in a sentimental way.
Kent has not fully abandoned the language of the horror
movie. Knocked unconscious, she thinks of herself and Aidan dancing in black
space. At another moment, she sees Hawkins’ face. At another, Aidan tells her
that he and their baby are all right, but utters the same words over and over.
A stranger appears in the dark and appears to be another figment of her
imagination – until Billy whacks him over the head.
At least one reviewer has complained that the ending is
unnecessarily drawn out. However, Kent stresses that the journey is as much
Billy’s as Clare’s. He calls himself Mangana – the blackbird – and at one point
appears to have turned into a bird to lead Clare out of the bush; this, as much
as her own shock, causes her to laugh uncontrollably. For me, the ending is as
it should be, Clare first confronting Hawkins with her voice before Billy sets
out to rid the world of two bad spirits.
Billy tells Clare to head for the river. She ends up at the
beach watching the rising sun. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the
ending. Could a person really have travelled so far so quickly? It is almost
dream like, but symbolically it is the first time the screen is filled with
natural light – throughout the rest of the drama, overgrowth blocks out the
sun. The film is shot in an ‘Academy’ aspect ratio (narrow screen, almost only
slightly wider than it is tall) to represent Clare and Billy’s oppressed state.
It also uses music sparingly. Mostly it is in the form of songs, either in
English or Gaelic, with some songs in a reconstructed aboriginal language, palawa
kani, written by Ganambarr.
Reviewed at Sundance
London, Picture House Central Screen Four, Piccadilly Circus, Wednesday 29 May
2019, 11:00am press screening
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