The Nightingale takes place in 1825 in the Australian state of Tasmania. I had to look up the Wikipedia article for movies located and filmed in Tasmania to make sure whether this was the first movie I had ever seen that took place there. To my surprise, I had seen a 2016 movie called Lion starring Dev Patel and Nicole Kidman. I thought that movie had taken place in Sydney or whatever. Anyway, The Nightingale is the second Tasmanian movie I have seen.
The Nightingale was written
and directed by Jennifer Kent. This is her second movie following up on her
exceptional debut, The Babadook. That movie, though rightly classified
as a horror film, was also an exceptional piece of drama, its main villain
symbolically interwoven with actual medical diagnoses of depression and sleep
psychosis. The Nightingale does
something similar. It too can be classified as a horror movie, however there is
no supernatural killer on the loose. Instead Jennifer Kent has simply chosen as
her setting a terrible place and time: the penal colony of Tasmania. There is
little to this that I know of, but given that Australia was but a large British
penal colony at the time, it is fair to say that the British colony on Tasmania
was probably worst. There was hardly any civilization to speak of: just men and
women with guns in a strange forest populated by hostile aboriginals. I have
seen several great gritty movies set in the Australian outback (The
Proposition, Wake in Fright). The Nightingale can take its place
amongst the best of them.
The plot of The Nightingale
would be entirely cliché if you modernized the setting and switched the
genders. A person whose family is murdered seeks revenge. Usually its an old
white guy this happens too (Rambo just did this again for the nth time last
week). But here the surviving member is a woman and the setting of 1820’s
Tasmania actually makes her vigilantism necessary. There really is no one else
that can see that justice be done here. The law, if you can call them that,
were the perpetrators, and they have already left, probably never to return.
The absent presence of cliché lends the movie considerable dramatic weight,
which Jennifer Kent presents in an unflinching straightforward manner. I cried at
a specific point in this movie. That’s all. I won’t say more.
To hunt down the men who murdered
her family, Clare (played by Aisling Franciosi) enlists the help of a local
aboriginal named Billy (played by Baykali Ganambarr). One night by the fire
they trade conversation on who is the most oppressed: the aboriginal whose
culture was broken and land was stolen or the Irish woman who was sent to
Tasmania for a petty crime, who has been the constant victim of sexual abuse,
and whose family was murdered before her eyes. It is interesting to note that
their initial reluctance to sympathize with the other’s experience has less to
do with an ignorance of the hardships the other has suffered but more to a belief that they have suffered
more. That is, why should I sympathize with you when it is I that deserves your
sympathy. In the end, they form a unique respect for each other and their
shared travails.
Jennifer Kent is an exceptional
filmmaker. I try to make a point of saying that after seeing two very good
first films. She is the type of talent that you hope makes a movie every two to
three years. Unfortunately, it took four years for her to make this movie after
The Babadook. That is too long of a time to wait for her next movie.
Female directors have a way of making very good movies and falling off the face
of the earth. I hope if the industry should change in any way that it changes
in this regard and we get a new Jennifer Kent movie sooner rather than later.
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