filmmaker Warwick Thornton
SAMSON AND DELILAH
A-
Australia (102 mi) 2009 d: Warwick
Thornton
Above all else, this is basically a road picture which
follows the exploits of two young Aboriginal teenagers from their daily
routines in their tiny desert village to the moment they are both ostracized
from that community and feel forced to flee, hoping for a better life, but only
find more horrors that await them. This is as downbeat a film as I’ve
seen in years, but also displays an uncompromising vision as it accurately
reflects the poverty, lack of education, boredom, substance abuse,
homelessness, social dysfunction, and the lack of any hope that something
better awaits any of them, leaving them in a gigantic hole of futility, where
their only friend in the world is utter hardship and despair. It’s as if
they are both doomed to spend the rest of their lives impoverished, friendless
and alone, which is what draws them together, not because they actually like or
are attracted to one another, but they are kindred spirits that share the same
dim future. Samson (Rowan McNamara) and Delilah (Marissa Gibson) are both
victims of their harsh environment, where their elders can be the cruelest
examples of the hopelessness that pervades their world. The depiction of
the Aboriginal world is so uniquely barren and empty that it feels unworldly,
as if there’s no place for it in this world, which by its desolation and
devastatingly sad bleakness feels all the more real.
Samson, who utters a single word throughout the entire film,
is already a petrol sniffer, where he’s constantly seen inhaling this
monstrously addictive substance that literally destroys brain cells on
contact. He has violent mood swings where he tends to grow irritable,
destroying whatever he sees with a giant stick, just an example of his highly
combustible nature. Delilah, on the other hand, makes Aboriginal
paintings with her grandmother and otherwise leads a quiet life looking after
her. But when her grandmother dies suddenly, all the elders erroneously
blame her, as if she wasn’t providing proper care, actually beating her with a
stick, brutal acts that make little sense, especially since she was the only
one looking after her. Samson, meanwhile, awakens each day to his
brothers sitting on the front porch playing fairly rudimentary electric ska
music, where they play the same song all day long in an endless session of
monotony, so he attacks his brother with a stick one day to get him to stop.
But this only leads to retaliation, hostility, and greater community
outrage. On something of a whim, Samson grabs the wounded Delilah and
heads out of town in the first vehicle he can break into, which happens to be
the only village automobile. His problem, however, is that he needs the
petrol more to sniff than to run the car, so by nightfall they are stranded in
the middle of nowhere, which of course, is where they’ve always been.
The scenes in the city of Alice Springs are even more
hauntingly bleak, as what money they have is spent on the first day, leaving
them stranded and even more ostracized in an all-white environment based on
their racial attributes, which immediately identifies them as a couple that
does not belong. Only a partially sane and eccentric homeless man, the
director’s real-life alcoholic brother Scott, prone to singing nonsensical
songs while living under an overpass bridge, offers them anything resembling
friendship, where he shares whatever food he has while serenading them with his
latest soliloquy, at one point singing bits of Tom Waits’s alcoholic-tinged
“Jesus Gonna Be Here,” Tom Waits - Jesus Gonna Be
Here - YouTube (3:21). Delilah at
least attempts to mingle with the white crowds, also an art store proprietor
that sells Aboriginal art for $22,000 a painting, but is only scoffed at and
ridiculed, leaving her as devastated as Samson, quickly joining in his
addiction of sniffing petrol full-time, leaving them both abandoned and
oblivious to the world around them. Because the film is etched with such
vivid realism, the audience gets a highly personalized view of their plight,
one of the better films at showing the cultural impact of racism which is so
casually embedded in the indifference of the majority white culture, where an
unbridgeable chasm exists between the two cultures, where whites shoo them away
with the same annoying effort as swatting a fly. But like any good road
movie, this one has multiple possibilities, and the film could take any number
of different directions, where one of its rare qualities is leading us in one
direction while actually taking us somewhere else altogether. This kind
of misdirection is highly appealing, as the audience begins to wonder whether
the real world has been transformed into a netherworld, where what’s happening
onscreen plays out in multiple dimensions, adding to the intrigue about where
this is all leading.
Etched in country ballads, simplicity and a near wordless
relationship between the couple, played by two non-actors, yet their tenderness
towards one another only increases due to the difficulty of their travails,
where all they have in this world quite literally is each other. The
hostile world around them never softens or even bends, but somehow they manage
to survive against all odds, where even their survival may only be in some
metaphorical state, where from their vantage point the world of the whites
begins to look dreamlike and surrealistic. The hardcore truths depicted
in this picture are drop dead amazing, yet the story unravels with such a
naturalistic and effortless grace. There’s a kind of Bressonian BALTHAZAR
(1966) at play here, where everywhere this couple goes, they are treated as
less than human, yet somehow, they transcend their earthly surroundings, from
the boredom of the dead-end village where they were raised to the entrenched
hatred of the nation that has no use for them and would rather confine them to
undesirable and remote tribal land where they remain out of sight and out of
mind. Thornton, who wrote, directed, filmed, played guitar and wrote the
music for his first feature-length film, which won the Camera D’Or at Cannes in
2009 for the best first feature, brings this couple from behind closed doors
out into the world, like a modern day Mary and Joseph, where despite the
passage of thousands of years in a Biblical sense, there is still no room at
the inn.
No comments:
Post a Comment