The Nightingale Film- The Black Wars

‘THE NIGHTINGALE’- CHALLENGING HISTORICAL DRAMA

The film THE NIGHTINGALE has earned itself a reputation for unsettling its audience and provoking extreme reactions because of the brutality it depicts on the screen, including visceral stabbings, shootings, infanticide and multiple rapes. When I went yesterday at the Nova, the film was freeze framed fifteen minutes in, on a shot of a bewildered Clare, the Irish convict, grappling to come to terms with sexual assault and the dual murders of her baby son and her husband. This was because of a distraught woman several rows behind me who had something akin to an episode of panic or fear, who was escorted outside by friends and staff. Others took the opportunity to walk out at this moment. Then the film rolled on again with Clare wandering the jungle of early 19^th century Tasmania, in search of an Aboriginal tracker to enable her to find her family’s killers and seek revenge.

I left the film feeling rewarded and challenged, and grateful for films like The Nightingale that take risks in order to tell important stories about our past in a truthful and unflinching way. I say our past because it is refreshing to see an important Australian story unfold rather than something that happened in Poland in WW2 or America in the 1950’s or South Africa during apartheid. I saw Mike Leigh’s Peterloo recently, and as much as I appreciated the craftmanship, I couldn’t help feeling that we are so often subjected to other people’s stories.  I read Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (NSW), now I’ve seen this film (Tasmania), and now I am hungry for a colonial story about Victoria.

The film shows Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1825 to be a completely lawless society where those in power (the British), think nothing of treating those ‘beneath them’ with utter contempt. Very low on the scale are the Irish women convicts, like Clare, who has earnt the right to become a free settler. She is married, with a baby, simply asking for her freedom three years after it is overdue. Firstly, she approaches her overseer (the principal antagonist in the film) asking for her rights, only to be struck across the face and raped. Then her husband sees the same British officer on their behalf, and we, the audience, hold our breath as he confronts his ‘boss’ assertively, demanding their release, and is forced to watch his wife get raped again, and is then shot dead for his troubles. Their screaming baby is suddenly put out of its misery. This is no place for baby, mother and pleading husband, Irish convicts.

Then we have the original settlers, all victims of the Black Wars, the Tasmanian aboriginals. The small British troupe led by murderous officer Hawkins, on their way to Launceston with their own black tracker, encounter aboriginals on their path.  One such helpless woman, alone in the bush with her small child, has the misfortune to fall across their path. One of Hawkins’ subordinates sums up the situation with a gleeful look in his eye. He pleads with Hawkins to be allowed to rape her, and Hawkins agrees to his demand, but only if he is prepared to go second. The terrified aboriginal woman screams in horror and lapses into her native tongue calling upon spirits to defend her and her child.

This is just one of many horrific crimes perpetrated against both the Irish and the blacks. Clare’s black tracker, Billy, finds it easier to accept his navigational task once he realises that Clare is Irish, and that they both have in common a deep contempt for the British. In what might be the most telling scene in the film, Clare and Billy come across a separate group of British officers marching away from Launceston, guns pointed at their black prisoners. Billy converses with them in his native tongue and discovers that his tribe, the Linetemairrener people, have all been massacred. This is an incredibly weighty moment for Billy. His self-control becomes extraordinary when he witnesses these black men being shot in front of him for speaking their native tongue, with one of them even getting his head cut off for as a trophy for one of the British officers. Billy walks on with Clare, shock, but at the same time, deep resignation, scrawled all over his face. Afterall, he has very little choice. It is not until later in the film that he breaks down, sobbing painfully for the massacre of his people. He is so acutely aware that it is his land, the land of his people, that is being desecrated unflinchingly with murder and abuse.

I never read any of this in the Australian history books at high school. There were brief mentions of aboriginal history. However, much of it was taken up with the various ways that New South Wales and other states were settled, seemingly painlessly and with precision. Larissa Behrendt, the well-known aboriginal academic from Sydney, has written a piece in The Guardian about Hannah Kent’s misguided approach to the whole colonial issue- https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/aug/20/the-nightingale-review-ambitious-urgent-and-necessarily-brutal-but-who-is-it-for

Behrendt admires the film, however, she does have some strong misgivings. She objects to the fact that ‘this is clearly Clare’s story: the film starts with Clare and ends on her gaze, privileging her point of view. It is from Clare’s perspective that the connections between her situation and that of Aboriginal people like Billy are explored.’ I understand her concerns. Some in the audience would leave the cinema with perhaps more of a feeling of the abuse and injustices metered out to Clare, the Irish convict, than for Billy, and I can see why this might be a problem. The fact that she thinks Billy’s story, and the story of the aboriginal people, are somehow subordinate to newcomers, like convicts, naturally grates with her. But I can imagine asking Hannah Kent about this. She would tell me that she was conscious of the black story all throughout. Otherwise we would not have scenes as described above. I for one was more conscious of Billy and his story than I was of Clare’s. it’s all about our individual perspectives. My heart bled for both, but I would say Billy and his people in particular. His life, and his people’s lives, seemed to be the most disregarded, trashed, insignificant to me. The attitude of the British officers to Clare and Billy both was appalling.

 A feminist reading of the film, and Behrendt’s perspective as a woman, would lend itself to becoming more conscious of Clare’s plight than anyone else’s. But now, thinking back to the film, and feeling quite changed by it, I am thinking of the way land can be ripped away, the way an old order can so swiftly be altered to become a new order. I feel more aware than ever of the atrocities of the past and the way they keep continuing on to the present and the future. That is why we all need reminders of whose land we live under. This is why we should not always be submerged with stories from other countries and other continents and become much more aware of our own stories in our own backyards.

The film informed me, as much as anything else, that there are periods of utter lawlessness in our history where people can somehow be allowed to become corrupt, cruel, unforgiving. The British officers behave this way partly because they are given the opportunity on a platter. In their minds there is no recourse for their actions. They brutalise the men, and they take the women, because the opportunity presents itself to them and they cannot resist the feeling of power this opportunity gives them. You watch the film and you think of the victims equally. Clare may be white but she did not choose to go to Van Diemen’s Land. As for Billy and the other black men like him, well, it is their home. Or rather, was their home.

LOVELESS in chilly Russia

LOVELESS is one of those beautifully made, atmospheric Russian films that has garnered a lot of attention. Once upon a time I saw every Russian film on offer that was said to hold promise. My favourites were ones by Aleksander Sukorov. I bought a box set of Tarkovsky films. I remember Burnt By The Sun with incredible fondness. Another one called The Return by Andrey Zvyagintsev. 

This one I saw today, LOVELESS, is also directed by Zvyagintsev.

In the spirit of What Maisie Knew, the married couple (whose marriage has disintegrated and are in the throes of separating, but are still living with their twelve-year old son in a Moscow apartment) are continuously fighting and saying horrible things to each other and abandoning their responsibilities as parents. The mother, Zhenya, is particularly cruel in her open loathing of her only child, seeing in him the image of her husband, regretting not having an abortion and getting involved with Boris as an escape from her tyrannical mother.

The film opens with Alyosha walking home from school in a lonely, absent- minded way, cutting through the forest besides a lake on his way to the apartment. Unlike many schoolboys excited by the end of the school day and anticipating seeing his family at home, Alyosha must be dreading the evening he is about to spend at home. It is little wonder that his movements are languid and distracted. He finds a trail of long, plastic ribbon and hurls it into the air, watching it catch onto a suspended bough. It hangs, grimly, like a flimsy rope, and throughout the film I couldn’t let go of that haunting, potentially foreshadowing image… a hanging, from a tree…

The plot is pretty straightforward. It is a relief when the couple separate. After all, they are already cemented in new relationships. The deep loathing leaves no room for possible reconciliation. If ever a divorce was needed, it was this one. Unfortunately, though, the son has suffered through the fighting, and has overheard comments no child should ever here, of mutual parental abandonment. He hides, chillingly, behind a door, his face tortured with anguish. He takes himself off to bed sobbing uncontrollably about the unfairness of the world. No-one comforts him. Earlier, he is called a cry baby. From his mother, no maternal connection, just loathing. It is as though he is a nuisance and a stranger, somebody his parents were lumped with by a third party.

The negligent parents go about their daily lives- the mother pampered at a salon in a long scene, preparing to see her boyfriend, and later enjoying sex in his dimly-lit bedroom. The father is often shown at work, eating his lunch with a colleague, and fretting over the strict policies of his Christian-crusading employer who does not tolerate divorce from his employees. All this goes on while the child has apparently run away from home in search of badly needed solace elsewhere, and his parents take a long time to realise. The Moscow police do not take much interest so it is up to a diligent independent search team to try and locate the boy. This takes up a good portion of the film- searching the forest, asking another boy from school questions, searching an abandoned building and sticking up missing child notices everywhere. The director teases the audience with slow, forward moving tracking shots, encouraging us to think that he is about to be discovered, to no avail. To their credit the mother and father do take the three hour car journey to the city to see if he is staying with his obnoxious grandmother, however, once again their egos are front left and centre as they fight uncontrollably, harsh words spoken, their joint effort once again torn asunder.

There are the usual red herrings and moments of hope- those times that (from real life) Madeleine McCann’s parents might be able to relate to. Somebody of the boy’s age has wandered into a hospital. A body matching the description of Alyosha is waiting for them at the city morgue. Here, at the morgue, their grief is real, visceral, and it seems at last that perhaps the emotional cord that usually ties parents to their children might have surfaced. It takes the sight of the mutilated body of another person’s child for the enormity of their lack of responsibility to hit home. We see helpless, tortured sobbing from both parents. Initially we think it is their child. The fact that it isn’t, tells us that the enormity of their selfishness has hit home at last.

In his song ‘Raised On Love’, Justin Hayward sings of the bounteous joy of growing up in a loving home with a loving family:

‘We won't be sleeping on our own tonight
The star that guides us
Is still shining bright
And in the darkness
There will always be a light
I think I know now
What is wrong and what is right
‘Cause I was raised on love
Yes I was raised on love
And I thank heaven above
For being raised on love.’

John Lennon, on the other hand, speaking also from experience, sings in ‘Mother’:

‘Mother, you had me but I never had you,

I wanted you, you didn’t want me.

So I just have to tell you

Goodbye, goodbye.’

It is obviously the latter that applies here. This is the ‘Loveless’ that embodies the title of the film. But Russia seems ‘loveless’ in other ways as well. The absolute loathing that the mother and the daughter have for each other- Alyosha’s mother and grandmother. There is nothing between them. The landscape is cold and loveless. It if forever raining and the river and the forest seem incongruent with the city backdrop. The abandoned building that is explored in beautiful cinematography is cold and chillingly barren and wasted. There are those ubiquitous moments where everybody is on their phone. It seemed sad but reassuring in an odd way that people in Russia are wedded to their phones on public transport as they are in my world in Melbourne. Alyosha’s workplace is sterile, rows of people hammering at keyboards. And then there is that tragic image of the mother being pampered at the salon for so long, oblivious to the machinations of her son’s troubled mind. When she does finally realise the truth, she rings her estranged husband at work. His implacable attitude to needing to remain at work is sickening.

The boy is, by the way, never found. We never see him dangling from one of the trees in the forest after all. Which is of some comfort I suppose, but by then the audience is worn down by the relentless futility and shades of Gothic horror that we neither care or expect it. Victim he remains.

The final shot of the film is of Zhenya on a treadmill on the front porch of her family home. She has all the material wealth she could ever envisage, the creature comforts of bourgeoisie living, sans love and joy, and love-making in dimly-lit rooms. Her gaze is steely, steadfast. She is wearing a tracksuit top emblazoned with RUSSIA on it. The connection is unmistakable, and one wonders what Putin would make of it.

The father on the other hand? A new baby screaming in a cot in another ‘loveless’ state. The whole family straining, suffering, harrowed.  

ON AGEING: a tattered coat upon a stick

The film LUCKY (Harry Dean Stanton), held few surprises. That’s not to say it wasn’t any good. It was pretty good.  But there were things in it, in terms of what LUCKY did, and how Lucky felt, that did not surprise me. I’ve seen some very good films about getting old- the French one by Haneke- AMOUR- comes to mind. And the Paul Cox film, A WOMAN’S TALE. Also something by Sarah Polley- AWAY FROM HER- and older people in some of Mike Leigh’s films as well. LUCKY is as good as most of these.

What wasn’t a surprise was the way in which Lucky did the same thing every day. Got out of bed in his white underwear and did exercises. Then took his crossword to his local coffee shop. Shuffled home again and watched TV even though what was on the screen was crap. Fell asleep. Stared at the alarm clock. Noticed that time was passing. Became irascible with other people and became a bit nasty and anti-social. Began thinking there might not be a good reason for living. Felt very lonely, and after an inexplicable fall, felt more mortal than ever.

Then Lucky was able to tell a kind, female visitor that he felt lonely- or was it scared? Then he accepted an unexpected invitation to a Spanish boy’s birthday. Here he felt moved enough to sing, beautifully, and received genuine, warm applause that touched him. Suddenly life had improved and he felt like he was worth something after all. He looked directly into the camera and smiled for almost the first time- a radiant, beautiful smile, very different to the scowl given by Harriet Anderson in SUMMER WITH MONIKA. And Lucky didn’t die in the end, but walked off into the Arizona distance, possibly even shuffling a little less as well.

I know someone a bit like Lucky.

He stays up very late and becomes very lethargic in the mornings. He shuffles around the unit each day, propped up in his favourite armchair. He sits in that armchair until evening, having short little breaks. These might be regular toilet breaks, or standing up to look out the window at the car that has driven past. He also checks the letterbox at regular intervals. Accompanying him in the armchair is the daily newspaper, the one put out by the Murdoch press, the one he says he loathes.

At the south end of the unit there is the back glass sliding door, and a neat little courtyard, garden table, and garage. It is here that various birds seem to gather during the day. He has always liked birds; always favoured them over cats, for instance. These days’ birds have become more important to him. Something he can talk or whistle to. He also enjoys proffering gifts, such as water, and nibbles and the like.

Memories, the past. These things sometimes invade his thoughts. The issue is, however, that sometimes he is fuzzy on detail. The things that occurred in boyhood, with his parents, are shadowy and far from blunt or acute. Details of the early years of his marriage are easier. But even here he can’t remember the bridal car, the church where the events took place, the details about the honeymoon…except it must have been close. He remembers there wasn’t a lot of money. Like a bright flash in his mind he is suddenly conscious of the money issue again…now. However it wasn’t always like this.

He had money sifting through his leaky hands when he was younger and stronger. He worked more than one job. Sometimes three- well, two at any rate. They were the best of times. The times when he could saunter into a TAB and unleash a whole heap of notes and coins onto the women behind the grill, and take piles of those thin white betting papers into his sweaty palms. He felt like a rich man on these occasions. Money no object. And no matter if he lost. He would work hard and there would be more to play with, and other places to play…poker machines. He deserved it. He worked hard. It was his money. And it was a private matter- that made it more thrilling. He could hide it from his wife.

………………………………………………………

I have had plenty of experience with nursing homes over the years. It may have been visiting relatives, or more commonly, arranged visits associated with my line of work. I have often enjoyed these times. I like talking about different experiences, other people’s families, and memories. Memories are so important. When you’re old I imagine it is very difficult not to look back.

I enjoy associating things with film and literature. When I think about old people and film, I can’t help remembering some awful things, like the young getting onto the old in ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (can you spare some cutter, me brothers?’). In ‘Amour’, Georges has difficulty accepting the state of things when his long time marriage companion, Anne, suffers a debilitating stroke. I can think of at least three films that involve suffocation using a pillow, and this is easily the most moving of them. Old age throws up incredible challenges for the sanest and fittest of the partners. He is grief stricken by his wife’s illness and can’t bear to let go of her, and she simply wants to die.

In Colm Toibin’s beautiful novel, ‘The Heather Blazing’, we are presented with a similar situation. Eamon, the retired judge living in Enniscorthy, has to manage his wife, Carmel, who has had a stroke, and on one terribly sad occasion, has to soap her body when she loses control of her bowels after a mountain walk. It is a difficult thing for him to do because their intimacy has always been uneasy. He is a reserved man who loves his wife but has difficulty reaching out to her. She, on the other hand, has always felt this gap painfully, and is able to reflect, after her illness, that she isn’t certain of his feelings. It becomes very important to her, this idea of just wanting to know, of the reinforcement or acknowledgement of his love for her.

Any consideration of old age and the confused and traumatic worlds it conjures up must include a reference to ‘King Lear’. Here it is at least two-fold. Firstly, the moving and deep love for Lear by the wounded and dutiful daughter, Cordelia. Near the end, when he partially regains his senses, and realises the folly in his earlier abandonment of his youngest and kindest child, Lear cannot fathom her undying love. He knows he doesn’t deserve it. And yet, due to her unblinking devotion, he is able to imagine, even if it is futile, a world beyond the crushing defeat of his reign:

‘Come, let’s away to prison.

We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.

When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—

Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out—

And take upon’s the mystery of things

As if we were God’s spies. And we’ll wear out

In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones

That ebb and flow by the moon.’

The other side of the coin is the attitude to the twin monsters, Goneril and Regan, Lear’s other daughters. Lear is expendable. He is no longer useful. He has become a foolish old man. And this is what happens sometimes to the elderly. They become foolish old people. I sometimes wonder if quite young people ever fully realise that they, too, will become quite old. I guess it is something we think about as we get older. At the age of 10, or 15, or even 20 or 25, you don’t contemplate things that are so far away and seem somehow intangible.

W B Yeats wrote a poem called ‘Sailing to Byzantium’:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress…’

Here, the body has faded, it is beyond use, only scarecrow-like, yet the old man is not defeated. He is raging further along, expressed in his very vibrant and very alive soul that has not departed. He is not falling towards death but rather fighting it and refusing it. He is simply not ready.

………………………………………………………………………………

The man I know feels bereft. He is no longer able to drive. He feels hemmed in, somehow…helpless. Is there any need to dress? Will tomorrow be the same? What of my regrets? Did I work long enough? Do I care that I never went overseas?

The film, LUCKY, throws up new possibilities about getting old. Where routine can be broken and new things and places can be discovered. It doesn’t all have to be futile. For me? All I ask for is the crossword and a pen and a few books if I can still read, and I hope I will still like to talk to other people, but part of me suspects, probably not.

When I walk around shopping centres, in particular, I think about ageing. It’s because here I see teenagers, boys and girls, strutting around, looking for cool clothes and meeting up, maybe seeing a film. They are a world away from getting old, and they know it. Old people have zero significance in their life. The old, grey-haired woman with the walking frame and the slightly sour expression means absolutely nothing to them. They don’t even see her- or, for that matter, the old man in the grey cardigan with balding hair who has allowed his eyebrows to grow wild, as well as the hair in his ears. They are invisible, unless they accidentally stumble and fall, in which they would become a spectacle. Old age, like this, is a world away for them, and they don’t think about it. Like the young Simon and Garfunkel singing OLD FRIENDS- ‘how terribly strange to be seventy’. They surmised that at seventy you would become a ‘bookend’- now, though, they probably see it as not being as old as they once thought (Garfunkel was born in 1941, Simon a month earlier) which makes them both 76. Now, are they both bookends, on park benches?

These teenagers at the shopping centre have a grandfather or grandmother, or Nonno, or Nonna, etc. Living in Rome as a teenager in the 30’s or 40’s, Nonna probably sat on the Spanish Steps in her short skirt, exhibiting almost the exact behaviour as her future granddaughter in Melbourne, or Sydney, etc seventy or eighty years hence.

Someone said the other day- it might have been Barry Humphries- that this is the era of ageism. And I think he is probably right.

Gay, Black America: Moonlight

MOONLIGHT is a newish American film with an all- black cast that deals with drug addiction, family dislocation, struggles with personal identity and, especially, the human need for love, connection and physical touch.

It charts the changes that take place in the life of one male and his continual struggles with his identity as a young boy, through to a painful adolescence, and an uncertain adult. Unlike the intelligent film BOYHOOD, which charted growth over a long period of time, played by the same actor, and therefore filmed over many years, MOONLIGHT features three separate actors of different ages representing the main character.

As a young boy, Chiron lives on a council estate in a poor black section of Miami with his crack-addicted mother. She can barely look after him, and the bullying he attracts from his peers goes unnoticed and untended. He is just unable to quite fit in. He has a promising relationship with a surrogate mother and father (Juan) around the corner, and much to his mother’s chagrin, he spends quite a lot of time there. It is here that his issues are sensitively dealt with. He asks for the meaning of ‘faggot’, and is told that it is an unkind word for someone who is gay. It is almost verging on a Scout-Atticus relationship, until the boy finds out that Juan deals in drugs. Not only that, but he supplies the boy’s mother. It’s a depressing coda to the first story. A cut throat and desperate society.

The second story features the boy at about 18. Things are no better. He is still pretty much monosyllabic in his responses to things. There are years of pain in his inability to communicate. His mother is still around, but she is a sad, hopeless case. She demands money from him to support her habit and has taken up prostitution. His relationships with his peers is still pretty much disastrous. Two other boys stand up. One, who calls him ‘black’, but is nevertheless sympathetic, introduces him to weed, and sex. There is a rare moment of softness in the film when the two young men kiss tentatively, and one masturbates the other. The other male is not so comforting. He takes a homophobic stand against him and seems to somehow resent his softness and sensitivity. He bullies the gay friend into bashing him, and after several blows, when he is down on the ground, the cowardly mob kick and continue to bash him. It sparks some sort of resolve and anger because, shortly after somewhat recovering, he marches into school filed with revenge and determination, and smashes a wooden chair over the bully, just as one desperate prisoner might do to another prisoner who has stepped over the mark one time too many. Incarceration follows, although this is a period of his life that is left unexplored.

Flash forward to when he is at least 30 but possibly more. Not much has changed spiritually. He seems even more distant and empty. He is, however, a mountain of a man, a bit implausibly so. He was always skinny, of slender though tall stature. His mother is sad and regretful for her crap parenting skills, apologizing to him in rehab. She’s quite broken. If he has any purpose now, it is in his huge muscles, gold chains and aggressive exterior, including ‘grills’, or gold false teeth covers.  Out of the blue, a phone call comes from the person all those years ago who introduced him to tenderness. It seems neither of them have forgotten it.

It is a long drive to the café which his old friend runs. The men are very tentative, and this is all nicely and authentically, and touchingly done. Where do each fit now, with the other? The conversation is filled with probings and uncertainties. It has been a long time. Is there still an attraction? One of the final frames of the film show the men holding each other. It is the love, and understanding, and simply the art of comfort and touching, that we all crave. This is probably the most interesting Chiron. Trying to prove himself, in his masculinity, but the same numbness and softness underlies everything.

The story itself is quite good but not overly flash. The film has won plaudits for its ‘brave’ and original take on homosexuality in the black world. The film deserves the most credit, however, for the beauty of its lens work. It is lovely to look at throughout. When the camera glides around, and is hand-held, and the unusual point of view shots are chosen, it’s not because it is trying to be clever and arty. It is part of the way of telling the story in a powerful way. The film begs to be a part of some high school or university film course.