BDirected by Jennifer Kent Starring Aisling Franciosi, Sam Claflin, and Baykali Ganambarr Review by Jon Kissel |  |
Jennifer Kent moves from the psychological/supernatural horror of The Babadook to the horror of historical atrocity in The Nightingale. While the monster of her debut was somehow turned into a camp icon, one doubts there will be similar exaltation of her follow-up. The Nightingale is an unrecommendable film, not in the sense that it’s poorly made, but in the sense that one can’t tell another person to watch it and experience its depths of human cruelty and misery in good conscience. Within those constraints, Kent makes common cause with films like Son of Saul, Come and See, or Lilya-4-Ever, all good-to-great entries in a category that find the bottoms of what people are capable of doing to each other. The Nightingale sings a song of abuse and violence and genocide, but for those with the stomach for it, there’s grace and resilience here, too. How much brutality one is willing to sit through to get there, however, is up to the viewer.
Aisling Franciosi plays the titular character, so nicknamed by her owner in all but name. An Irish convict in the penal colony that is Tasmania in the mid-18th century, Franciosi’s Clare is in the service of Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin), though he’s promised her freedom on multiple occasions. Desperate to leave this place with her husband Aidan (Michael Sheasby) and their new baby, Clare is too forceful in her asking, at least by the standards of the tyrannical Hawkins, and, in the first of many instances of men lording their power over whatever women are nearby, he brutally rapes her, intimating during the act that this is a regular occurrence. This starts a spiral that ends with a horror show in Clare’s home that led to several filmgoers lurching out of the theater, leaving those who stayed in their seats to soak up what might be one of the most harrowing escalations of violence and depravity that I’ve ever seen onscreen. In the aftermath, a vengeful Clare first goes to the authorities, but she’s a mere convict whose testimony no one would believe against a proper English gentleman, especially one who’s just left town to argue that he deserves a promotion and a new post. Left with nothing but her anger, she enlists an Aboriginal tracker named Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) to hunt down Hawkins and his small retinue as they traverse the Tasmanian wilderness.
What follows could have been a higher-brow version of a Tarantino historical revisionist revenge tale, wherein someone who deserves justice takes it by any means necessary. After the harrowing first act, the viewer is certainly in need of some bloody catharsis. While I greatly enjoy the Inglourious Basterds of the world, that’s not the movie that Kent is making. The introduction of Billy, or Mangana as he was originally named, places Clare’s victimhood amongst an island rife with people who have gone through what she has and worse. The film lacks historical placards or text crawls, but happening in the background is the Black War between the colonialists and the aboriginals, a conflict that ended with all but a few dozen aboriginals remaining on the island. As Clare bears witness to this conflict through Mangana, the futility of finding justice here becomes apparent and the Nightingale shifts to the search for dignity, something that can be asserted by an individual instead of bestowed upon them. My favorite TV show, Deadwood, contained a similar thread in its final season, where the murder of a labor organizer was responded to by the camp fathers with a heartfelt obituary for the deceased in the local newspaper. As Deadwood asserted that the organizer was not merely an impediment to powerful forces, so does Clare insist that she is a living person entitled to some level of consideration.
If this was a simple revenge tale, however, Hawkins would serve as a worthy receptacle of righteous comeuppance. This is a uniquely despicable antagonist, teeming with entitlement and callousness and devoid of redeeming qualities. His bottomless anger is borne out of a resentment that everything, up to and including the use of the bodies of those around him, isn’t laid out before him. A person like him is uniquely suited to an environment where he can’t be punished, because no one cares what happens to a convict, much less an aboriginal. In the throes of his ghastly outbursts, what most sets him off is the screaming and the crying, likely because the noise prevents him from pretending that this is all sanctioned behavior and not horrendous affronts on fellow humans. The character never surprises the viewer, such that all one has to do in guessing Hawkins’ next move is imagine the worst thing he could do in any given situation, and he’ll meet you there.
The content of Kent’s script for The Nightingale was always going to be a tough sit, but the way that she films the proceedings compounds the difficulty. She leaves the viewer nowhere to hide, either visually or sonically. Scenes play out til unconsciousness or completion. In quieter moments, Kent builds on the Babadook and reverts to nightmares. Kent’s well-constructed and unsettling imagery matches up well with fellow dream-logic directors like Michael Haneke or David Lynch. Even the film’s potentially heartfelt moments are undercut by the intrusion of what those moments actually mean. When Clare and Mangana take shelter in a farmhouse, he is at first not permitted to sit at the dinner table with Clare and the homeowners. When he is invited to the table, it’s not treated as some warm-hearted act of racial reconciliation, but as a humiliating contradiction. A man is asked to sit at a table in his own country, and the asker thinks this basic courtesy is some grand gesture instead of a reminder of how Mangana’s world has been destroyed within his short lifetime.
Amongst all this difficulty, Franciosi, Claflin, and Ganambarr are stripping themselves bare and finding new layers of emotional nakedness to portray. Though their characters occupy different poles of a moral spectrum, all surely needed counseling to get through the Nightingale. There’s obviously the shock that Franciosi has to go through and the reliving of a black period in Ganambarr’s ancestry, but Claflin also must’ve experienced a kind of moral injury by inhabiting Hawkins. Kent asks all this of her cast to strip bare the myth of British propriety, that no one with buttons so shiny could rape and reave their way through the world. Something in that accent has blinded people, as if domination through colonialism could’ve been achieved in any way other than violence and oppression. The Nightingale, with its elongated and troublesome ending, isn’t so great as to make all of its horrors worth it, but in the unrecommendable category, it does shine a grim light on an underserved period of history. Getting to that light, however, requires a big ask of the viewer. B
What follows could have been a higher-brow version of a Tarantino historical revisionist revenge tale, wherein someone who deserves justice takes it by any means necessary. After the harrowing first act, the viewer is certainly in need of some bloody catharsis. While I greatly enjoy the Inglourious Basterds of the world, that’s not the movie that Kent is making. The introduction of Billy, or Mangana as he was originally named, places Clare’s victimhood amongst an island rife with people who have gone through what she has and worse. The film lacks historical placards or text crawls, but happening in the background is the Black War between the colonialists and the aboriginals, a conflict that ended with all but a few dozen aboriginals remaining on the island. As Clare bears witness to this conflict through Mangana, the futility of finding justice here becomes apparent and the Nightingale shifts to the search for dignity, something that can be asserted by an individual instead of bestowed upon them. My favorite TV show, Deadwood, contained a similar thread in its final season, where the murder of a labor organizer was responded to by the camp fathers with a heartfelt obituary for the deceased in the local newspaper. As Deadwood asserted that the organizer was not merely an impediment to powerful forces, so does Clare insist that she is a living person entitled to some level of consideration.
If this was a simple revenge tale, however, Hawkins would serve as a worthy receptacle of righteous comeuppance. This is a uniquely despicable antagonist, teeming with entitlement and callousness and devoid of redeeming qualities. His bottomless anger is borne out of a resentment that everything, up to and including the use of the bodies of those around him, isn’t laid out before him. A person like him is uniquely suited to an environment where he can’t be punished, because no one cares what happens to a convict, much less an aboriginal. In the throes of his ghastly outbursts, what most sets him off is the screaming and the crying, likely because the noise prevents him from pretending that this is all sanctioned behavior and not horrendous affronts on fellow humans. The character never surprises the viewer, such that all one has to do in guessing Hawkins’ next move is imagine the worst thing he could do in any given situation, and he’ll meet you there.
The content of Kent’s script for The Nightingale was always going to be a tough sit, but the way that she films the proceedings compounds the difficulty. She leaves the viewer nowhere to hide, either visually or sonically. Scenes play out til unconsciousness or completion. In quieter moments, Kent builds on the Babadook and reverts to nightmares. Kent’s well-constructed and unsettling imagery matches up well with fellow dream-logic directors like Michael Haneke or David Lynch. Even the film’s potentially heartfelt moments are undercut by the intrusion of what those moments actually mean. When Clare and Mangana take shelter in a farmhouse, he is at first not permitted to sit at the dinner table with Clare and the homeowners. When he is invited to the table, it’s not treated as some warm-hearted act of racial reconciliation, but as a humiliating contradiction. A man is asked to sit at a table in his own country, and the asker thinks this basic courtesy is some grand gesture instead of a reminder of how Mangana’s world has been destroyed within his short lifetime.
Amongst all this difficulty, Franciosi, Claflin, and Ganambarr are stripping themselves bare and finding new layers of emotional nakedness to portray. Though their characters occupy different poles of a moral spectrum, all surely needed counseling to get through the Nightingale. There’s obviously the shock that Franciosi has to go through and the reliving of a black period in Ganambarr’s ancestry, but Claflin also must’ve experienced a kind of moral injury by inhabiting Hawkins. Kent asks all this of her cast to strip bare the myth of British propriety, that no one with buttons so shiny could rape and reave their way through the world. Something in that accent has blinded people, as if domination through colonialism could’ve been achieved in any way other than violence and oppression. The Nightingale, with its elongated and troublesome ending, isn’t so great as to make all of its horrors worth it, but in the unrecommendable category, it does shine a grim light on an underserved period of history. Getting to that light, however, requires a big ask of the viewer. B
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