Throughout settler-colonial history, the bodies of women both black and white have served as a battleground.
Australia’s ugly past swoops down like a vulture on carrion, a blowfly on effluent, in Jennifer Kent’s historical horror story, THE NIGHTINGALE.
Writer director Kent transports us to 1825 Van Diemen’s Land, where Clare, a 21-year-old Irish convict, had been transported as a 14 year old.
Having served her seven year sentence, she is hopeful to be free of her abusive master, the despicable Lieutenant Hawkins who refuses to release her from his charge, preferring to keep her “caged” as a nightingale where he can order her to sing and provide sexual servitude.
Clare’s freedom beckons with husband Aidan and their still breast feeding baby, Brigid, but Hawkins’ hideous jealousy manifests in a heinous and harrowing crime at the hands of this monstrous misogynist and his cronies.
Unable to secure justice from the British authorities, Clare decides to pursue Hawkins, who leaves his post in arrogant blind ambition to secure a captaincy up north. She is forced to enlist the help of a young Aboriginal tracker Billy, who grudgingly takes her through Tasmania’s terrifying terrain, to track down Hawkins and his cohorts.
Clare, the sinned against songbird turned raptor and Billy, whose totem is Mangana, the blackbird, are hostile towards each other from the outset, both suffering their own traumas from the Colonial authorities and both openly racist, towards each other, and against the British, but as their journey leads them deeper into the wilderness an uneasy truce and eventual trust is forged.
The terrain and the prevailing hostilities are frightening, as fighting between the original inhabitants of the land and its colonisers plays out in genocidal conflict. The fate of Billy’s family becomes clear and so Clare and Billy now share a mutual hunger and thirst for revenge against the barbaric savagery of the predominantly English colonisers.
Aisling Franciosi makes a compelling Clare, righteous anger incarnate, a determined avenging angel against the male evil personified in the characterisations of Sam Claflin’s Hawkins and Damon Herriman’s scurrilous dung beetle subaltern, Ruse.
Baykali Ganambarr is brilliant as Billy, wily and benign to begin with, his journey with Clare making clear the extent of the catastrophe of colonisation to his people and turning him into a baleful warrior, also righteous anger incarnate.
THE NIGHTINGALE sings with supporting players, a particular standout is Alan Faulkner as probably the only depiction of a white man with any decency in the film.
Production values are meticulous and of the highest order with director of photography, Radek Ladczuk, production designer Alex Holmes and costume designer Margot Wilson each contributing textural excellence to the fine fabric of the film.
Compelling and confronting, THE NIGHTINGALE is a tough, uncompromising film about our painful and shameful past, and, just as shamefully, a picture of prevailing prejudice against women and indigenous peoples.
Jennifer Kent has created a haunting, harrowing film balancing brutality with bravery and beauty, a dark, poetic, visceral and provocative experience, an exhumation of the truth of historical violence to which we are summoned to witness.