The Damned Bush: The Nightingale

This week, we continue our celebration of women filmmakers with two reviews for films set predominantly in the wilderness. On Friday, we will check out a more b-movie variation on the them with Hogzilla. Today’s review is for a movie with a little something different on its mind …

Synopsis: Clare (Aisling Franciosi) is a prisoner who has been promised a letter of freedom for assisting Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin). Dubbed “The Nightingale,” she sings for the British soldiers stationed in Australia. She suffers terrible abuse at his hands, as well. Married to former convict turned free man Aiden (Michael Sheasby) and with a wee daughter Brigit (played by Addison and Maya Christie), she believes she can weather the abuse. Sadly, when her husband tries to pressure the lieutenant into supplying the letter that is overdue, he makes an enemy. Needing a target to show his dominance, Hawkins selects Clare and her family. Assisted by cruel buffoon Ruse (Damon Herriman) and Ensign Jago (Harry Greenwood), he is responsible for raping Clare, murdering her huddy and the death of her infant daughter before leaving the area to assume a new captaincy in Launceston. Left for dead, Clare survives and discovers a burning hatred for the men. Unable to travel the bush alone, she gets the assistance of Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), an aboriginal guide. To survive and succeed in her mission of vengeance, Clare must learn to trust this guide and have him trust her in return. Not as easy as it sounds in a world where soliders demean convicts and women and everyone demeans the black natives. Writer/director Jennifer Kent’s follow-up to her acclaimed horror picture The Babadook (2014) was a surprise, a historical revenge picture about a woman pushed too far in one of the ugliest chapters of Australian history, The Nightingale (2018).

DANIEL’S TAKE

Although it is not itself among the Ozsploitation genre of films—those Australian produced and shot pictures that employed sex, violence and horror in order to exploit an underutilized market niche—The Nightingale should be. There’s so much abuse here, so much horror (of a human variety as opposed to, say, a wild boar of unusual size ravaging the countryside) and so much violence (sometimes physical, plenty psychological and even more emotional) that Jennifer Kent’s sophomore feature is at time almost too difficult to watch. It might not have the near-pornographic eagerness (and masculine view) of, say, Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1973), which wins the prize of nigh-impossible for me to watch without flinching, but in terms of a candid approach to a rough road narrative about the evils men do, the two movies are siblings of a sort. Kent engages with her material without offering us a kernel of hope. Kindness is the most fragile concept of all, and it is quickly snuffed out by ambitious men and sadists.

And yet, for all that The Nightingale still manages to be a beautiful picture in terms of the images it employs, the attention to historic details in costuming and set design, and in terms of both Clare and Billy’s characterizations.

Although it is a revenge picture, a thriller about a woman hunting men who deserve to pay for the crimes they have committed, it is also an examination of race relations between the rotten Brits, their prison colonials, and the colonized natives. Clare is just as prejudiced as the rest from the start, terrified that Billy might well try to eat her in the night. Billy is convinced she is another awful Brit, and though he has no intentions of cannibalism, he will only do the job he was paid for.

“I paid you to protect me!” Clare snarls, when he disappears from the trail, leaving her to face a couple of loathsome prison guards. “You paid me to guide you,” he replies, “You protect yourself.” This is a concept that is brand new for her, and it is one she must grow into. Just as she must grow into the spirit of killing people and discover after her first kill that murder is not what she wants at all.

Any journey film, be it a road story like Wild At Heart (1990), the wandering-across-the-fantasy countryside The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003) or the numbing journey across a blasted landscape such as The Road (2009) makes strong use of episodic elements. A journey is a series of brief moments, unexpected meetings and strange happenstances that would never have occurred when the character remained in a single location. This can lend a road story a kind of rambling quality, making them a kind of situational pearl necklace where one self-contained moment follows another. This can be unsatisfying to sit through if your preference is for a more character driver plot.

There is a power to Kent’s filmic narrative, which employs both quasi-episodic encounters in the bush side by side with strongly developed character-based plot elements. It’s a challenging juggling trick, and yet Kent pulls it off and makes it look easy. The key here is in having two protagonists, Clare and Billy. In another story, Billy would be a secondary character at best. He fulfills the helper/guide role in the heroic myth archetype laid down by Joseph Campbell (it’s his occupation, after all). However, his decisions help shape the narrative. The journey across the countryside is paired with a journey between these characters, which can be witnessed during their sleeping arrangements. At first, Clare sleeps on the other side of a campsite, rifle between her and Billy. By the end, they are in closer quarters. Not lovers, for that would be far too easy to write and somewhat lazy. They become something far more interesting: equals and allies.

This is a quality Hawkins can never achieve. He lords over his men, but he cannot control them. He tries to take child prisoner Eddie (Charlie Shotwell) under his wing, making “a man” out of him, but soon learns the boy is not capable of becoming the subservient thug Hawkins has been grooming him to be. He cannot relate to women as anything but balms for his wounded ego, victims of his prick and temper. He cannot impress the leadership he desperately wants to impress. He sets himself apart, and he can never lay his innate prejudices and ambitions to rest in order to approach honest humanity. He is a character cut from the same cloth as Daniel Day Lewis’s Daniel Plainview character in 2007’s There Will Be Blood, unable to see anything worth liking in mankind and in constant competition to triumph over everyone around him. He is a royal shit, in other words. The journey that brings Clare and Billy closer also sees Hawkins killing off many of the quasi-allies he collects. Or if he does not, then the out of control pig Ruse does it for him, enacting his will even if Hawkins is incapable of seeing that he wanted to sow so much death and suffering in the first place.

The film has some things on its mind, and the characters it chooses to portray fit into those ideas. White men in any positions of power are generally shits. It is a simple fact for this movie that they all are. The folks who are not in positions of any power are generally not shits, though they can be awful to one another. I have read a few criticisms of the film as castigating men, and that’s simply not the case. This is not a movie without as much sympathy for its male characters as it has for its females. A group of aboriginals weep for their murdered women instead of chasing Hawkins and the gang responsible for her repeated sexual assaults and death. A white mother with babe in arms weeps for her burned house. Clare mourns her lost family and eroding soul, suffering nightmares with a growing number of angry spirits. Billy remembers his murdered people. A convict husband friend of dead Aiden tries to warn Clare off her path of revenge out of kindness. Everyone who experiences loss and pain is given a sympathetic portrayal. Those who feel no such emotions are the unsympathetic fiends.

The Nightingale is a movie that sees the corruption inherent in the pursuit of power and hammers that particular topic on the head as often as possible. It tackles colonialism and sexism. The antagonists can therefore seem dehumanized or one dimensional, particularly a brute like Ruse who pleads for mercy when his weapons are taken (he is unmanned) and who is quick to get back into the role of tormentor when the tables turn and he has a weak thing to play with. This may strike some viewers as an assemblage of straw men to kick over. I admit to not feeling too much empathy for the pigs and while I did not exactly cheer when they found their comeuppance, I did not weep for them either. I felt nothing for them, in fact, and only felt for our protagonists.

The Nightingale is not a happy story at the beginning, during the journey or at its conclusion. However, it is a story where we wonder about the effects all this violence will have upon the spirits of our two protagonists. We do not want them utterly destroyed and yet we dread that’s what will happen pretty much from the get-go.

Billy takes the blackbird as his totem animal. Clare receives the nightingale. We hope they, like their spirit animals, will fly up and away from the hellish world in which they dwell. Not much of a spoiler follows:

The film ends with a sunrise and the surviving characters gazing upon it with a hope for a new world’s dawn. We can only hope that new world they find themselves citizens in is one of light and goodness, though we might dread that such a world is illusory at best.

The Nightingale is a poetic piece, ugly in places, beautiful in others. Not an easy journey but one that is worth taking for those bold enough to follow it through to the end.

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The Nightingale is available in DVD, Blu-ray and streaming editions.

Next up, we switch around for something a little different. A pair of superhero films directed by women. I will review the new Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020), which is available in DVD, Blu-ray and streaming editions. Trist will be checking out the often-overlooked gem of brutality and action-adventure-horror, Punisher: War Zone (2008). That one is also available in DVD, Blu-ray and streaming editions.

“The Damned Bush: The Nightingale” is copyright © 2020 by Daniel R. Robichaud. Image and poster taken from IMDB.

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