April 4, 2010
Toasted at Cannes in 2009, winning the Camera D’Or, and the out and out runaway sucess of last year’s Inside Film and Australian Film Institute Awards, Warwick Thornton’s first feature is a riveting story of young love and isolation. Isolated culturally, individually, and geographically, the mostly-silent central pair of Aboriginal teens make one fundamentally question what a love story might comprise. The old boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl-boy-gets-girl-back story is subverted here into one that has boy see girl, boy throw rock at girl and the rest be history, despite a stunning and central moment of boy-loses-girl which is the film’s central moment of transformation and enlightenment.
The silence of the main characters stems, Thornton told the Sydney Daily Telegraph, from his inability to make them sound at all ‘natural’ speaking either in an indigenous language or in English. It gives Delilah’s initial indifference to Samson a power and ambiguity that would not be found if she were openly scornful. In her grandmother’s mocking, there is a wonderful certainty to the statement ‘that is your husband’, as it is undoubtedly what Samson becomes, if we are to forget the niceties and faff of bits of paper and cake.
Thornton’s untrained actors attract with their beauty, presence and the stoicism that their lack of speaking gives them. The unidiomatic English of the (only occasionally needed) subtitling gives a jarring foreignness that kills-off any assumption that Australia is an unequivocally English-speaking monoculture. The early change in Delilah’s circumstances, as well as the punishment meted out to each of our pair by the seniors of their community, provide us with difficult to watch cinema that ultimately leads to shows of strength from the protagonists.
From Picnic at Hanging Rock through to The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Australian cinema has been known for quoting foreign forms of expression and representation. In the hair-cutting that marks the two scenes of loss in this film, Thornton quotes instead from mourning rituals of indigenous widows for whom disfigurement was the only response to losing their husbands. Samson and Delilah is a stunning exercise in representation (despite its shying away from much actual politics) of Aboriginal communities today.
**WARNING: SPOILER ALERT! - Ed**
Perhaps counterfactual reviewing is something not to be undertaken lightly, but it is hard to wonder if the film wouldn’t have more (visceral/tragic) impact if the ending had come at the point when the two are temporarily lost to one another in Alice Springs. Their fate in the city at the hands of whitefellas is unsurprising and only adds to the separateness and desperation of the central characters. As Samson’s rescuing older brother effectively states, the city, like the community in which they meet, is not Delilah’s ‘country’.
The silence of the main characters stems, Thornton told the Sydney Daily Telegraph, from his inability to make them sound at all ‘natural’ speaking either in an indigenous language or in English. It gives Delilah’s initial indifference to Samson a power and ambiguity that would not be found if she were openly scornful. In her grandmother’s mocking, there is a wonderful certainty to the statement ‘that is your husband’, as it is undoubtedly what Samson becomes, if we are to forget the niceties and faff of bits of paper and cake.
Thornton’s untrained actors attract with their beauty, presence and the stoicism that their lack of speaking gives them. The unidiomatic English of the (only occasionally needed) subtitling gives a jarring foreignness that kills-off any assumption that Australia is an unequivocally English-speaking monoculture. The early change in Delilah’s circumstances, as well as the punishment meted out to each of our pair by the seniors of their community, provide us with difficult to watch cinema that ultimately leads to shows of strength from the protagonists.
From Picnic at Hanging Rock through to The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Australian cinema has been known for quoting foreign forms of expression and representation. In the hair-cutting that marks the two scenes of loss in this film, Thornton quotes instead from mourning rituals of indigenous widows for whom disfigurement was the only response to losing their husbands. Samson and Delilah is a stunning exercise in representation (despite its shying away from much actual politics) of Aboriginal communities today.
**WARNING: SPOILER ALERT! - Ed**
Perhaps counterfactual reviewing is something not to be undertaken lightly, but it is hard to wonder if the film wouldn’t have more (visceral/tragic) impact if the ending had come at the point when the two are temporarily lost to one another in Alice Springs. Their fate in the city at the hands of whitefellas is unsurprising and only adds to the separateness and desperation of the central characters. As Samson’s rescuing older brother effectively states, the city, like the community in which they meet, is not Delilah’s ‘country’.