Australian film looks squarely at brutality
Sexual violence is excruciating to watch. So is any violence motivated by racism. And with her new film “The Nightingale,” an elemental, nearmythic 19th century revenge tale told from a woman’s perspective, Jennifer Kent wants to remind us that they absolutely should be.
When the Australian writerdirector first started thinking about the movie she would make as the followup to her knockout 2014 debut, the inventive horror film “The Babadook,” Kent found herself struck by this: While devastating and unrepentant acts of violence — against women, but also against swaths of people who have been colonized or displaced, who lack resources and proper protection — continue unabated in the world, we largely shield ourselves from honestly depicting violence in any real, meaningful way.
Sure, raperevenge plots
“The Nightingale”:
(R) opens Friday, Aug. 9, in San Francisco. Opens Aug. 16 in other Bay Area theaters. have a history in cinema, but it’s a problematic, alltoooften titillating tradition. It rarely involves a woman behind the camera “or a true look at just how problematic, costly, even futile, vengeance can be as a solution,” Kent said recently by phone from her native Brisbane.
She went on explain that if we don’t look more squarely at one another in our darkest moments and put ourselves, as uncomfortable as it may be, in a victim’s shoes, we’ll never stand a chance of developing the empathy that could stem the centurieslong tide of human aggression.
“Violence against women is on the rise. And turning away from it isn’t doing anyone any favors,” Kent said.
In “The Nightingale,” Kent immerses us in the shattering experiences of a young female convict, Clare, played by Irish actress Aisling Franciosi (best known as Lyanna Stark on “Game of Thrones”). The story is set in 1825 in Tasmania, when the island off the southern coast of Australia was still a
brutal British penal colony called Van Diemen’s Land. It was known throughout the Western world as “hell on earth,” said Kent, a place where rapists, murderers and inveterate criminals were sent, “and yet where women who had committed even minor petty crimes (like Clare) were also sent. They were outnumbered 8 to 1, so you can imagine the environment these women faced.”
The penal colony was established against the backdrop of an attempted genocide of the island’s Aborigine inhabitants — a crime of such magnitude that Australians are still grappling with its fallout, just as the legacy of slavery is still felt in the U.S.
“Colonization, by nature, is a brutal act. And the arrogance that drives it lives on in the modern world. For this reason, I consider this a current story despite being set in the past,” Kent wrote in the film’s director’s note.
In “The Nightingale,” Clare is married, with an infant and desperate to be freed from her abusive master, a British lieutenant played by Sam Claflin (“Adrift”). He refuses to sign her release papers and instigates a gruesome series of crimes against Clare and her family. Left bereft and all but demolished by her losses, she takes off on her husband’s horse across the island’s wilderness seeking revenge on those who have hurt her. Clare enlists the help of Aborigine tracker Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), and they develop an unusually intense bond based on empathy for their shared losses.
Ever since premiering at the Venice Film Festival, where “The Nightingale” won a special jury prize, the film has been lauded for Kent’s ability to conjure an onscreen nightmare (albeit one grounded in historical fact), and has also been the subject of some controversy for Kent’s unusual approach to both rape and revenge.
Kent acknowledges “The Nightingale” uses long takes to push audiences to endure how unbearable violence is. Yet, when asked about reports in the Australian press of audience members walking out of a screening in disgust, Kent said, “I was there and it didn’t happen. I can’t help feeling there’s a double standard at work, either because I’m a woman or because of the approach I’ve taken.”
Her approach to depicting rape onscreen involves a deliberate lack of skin, or anything other than extended closeup shots of Franciosi. “Nothing more than a woman’s face in pain,” Kent said. “When we talk about the real damage violence does to people, I wanted to be very respectful and put the audience into the shoes of the person experiencing it. Isn’t it interesting that seeing a woman in that kind of emotional pain makes people more uncomfortable than senseless, graphic violence?”
“Jen and I had loads of conversations about how crazy it is that we’ve become desensitized to so many different kinds of violence,” said Franciosi, 28, during a visit to San Francisco. “You can watch a film and people’s heads are exploding and you don’t feel anything. That’s really dangerous. It distances you so much from what it really means to inflict violence on someone, and what that person actually goes through when it happens to them.”
Franciosi said she and Kent, who rehearsed together for 10 weeks before filming, also discussed the ways a rape scene in the film “absolutely would not look like a sex scene. Being forced to live it through Clare’s eyes, through Clare’s experience, you realize it has nothing to do with sex. It’s a destructive, humiliating, and just horrendous act of power and violence, and its victims live with the trauma and PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder) for years to come.”
“I’ve had a couple women come up to me after screenings and tell me, ‘Thank you so much for showing what PTSD is really like,’ ” Franciosi said. “And I thought if even more people might feel that way, that’s really the best, best thing that could come from this.”