THE NIGHTINGALE / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR & SCREENPLAY: JENNIFER KENT / STARRING: AISLING FRANCIOSI, SAM CLAFLIN, BAYKALI GANAMBARR / RELEASE DATE: 29TH NOVEMBER
In a preface to The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter wrote, “Can a bird sing only the song it knows, or can it learn a new song? Have we got the capacity at all of singing new songs?”
The Nightingale is a furious rape revenge tale from Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), situated not in fantasy – despite the mis-en-scène of the velvet black sky and howling moon making the roughness of the wilderness look like an oil painting – but in the troubled reality of the Van Diemen’s Land’s Black War in 1825. Irish convict Clare’s ability to extinguish her pain with fury, her passive state into the most active one, makes for a compelling and brutal watch, yet never feels exhausting; the film positively zips by, even when landing at two and a half hours.
After suffering the unbearable trauma of losing her husband (Michael Sheasby), whose only crime was being poor and too fond of drinking, and her baby (which happens in an act of distaste in an otherwise tasteful film), as well as being degraded to the point of abhorrence, Clare sets off, gun in tow, with her “black boy,” Billy (played with charm, wit and grace by Baykali Ganambarr) for protection. The animosity between them slowly curdles from sourness into sympathy; an unspoken tenderness between them that is all the more powerful for the lack of sentimentality. Two lower-class beings, broken by the same system.
Franciosi’s stare flips the head on any female passiveness. To exist in the passive state as a woman is to die in the passive state, that is to be killed – as Carter also said – and Clare’s journey is more than a straightforward tale of getting vengeance on those that hurt her, but about taking back control – of her body, her identity and her freedom – with female masochism and passiveness the modus operandi in a society where they are otherwise leered at, beaten, abused and raped.
What at first seems so shocking isn’t shock tactics of the exploitation type (rape revenge nasties like I Spit On Your Grave etc). There is nothing titillating here, except in exposing the brutality and sadistic sexual violence of men. If something shocks, it’s merely because men in reality are – and were – capable of acting out their violent fantasies, with the most vile of them all being Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin) who plays villainy with a grotesque ease. A line in the film – “who would believe a thieving whore over an officer?” – reminds you that gentlemen are just wolves in sheep’s clothing, leering at and penetrating the edges of the frame.
It is a film not just of Australia’s colonial past, but a story of women’s past, of a way of existing that demanded strength, that makes it all the more powerful.
