The Nightingale

Synopsis: Tasmania,1825 and Claire (Aisling Franciosi) is a young Irish convict married with a baby. Despite having served her term Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin) will not give her the ticket of freedom that is due to her. Passed over for promotion Hawkins takes his frustration out on Claire and her family in a particularly vicious way, leaving her to seek her revenge helped only by an Aboriginal,Mangana (Baykali Ganambarr).

There is no doubt that writer-director Jennifer Kent’s follow-up to her 2014 international critical and commercial hit, The Babadook is, like it, a superbly well-crafted film. However seemingly motivated by a desire to bend the conventions of the male-dominated revenge thriller she appears to have lost her hold on her material. 

For its first two thirds of her film Kent's principal protagonist Claire has the implacable drive of Lee Marvin in the genre bench-mark Point Blank (1967) or Mad Mikkelson in The Salvation (2014) but then inexplicably Claire loses her will-to-kill, the narrative wobbles this way then that, only to arrive finally at the resolution that was required of it in the first place. So what was the point of these distracting episodes?  As it is, and this is compounded by the fact that there Is nothing original in any of it, Kent’s appetite for displays of brutality with not one but two rapes, the vile murders of Amelia’s husband and child, and the summary execution of a group of Aboriginals yields a film that is overlong and ultimately, alienating. A rather cheesy final shot of a rising sun only seems to confirm Kent’s lack of grasp of what she was trying to say.

Partly this is, like The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), to remind us of the barbarity of Australia’s colonial origins, partly it is to give us a portrait of a strong female character in an institutionally-entrenched, callously sexist environment. But if Kent succeeds in the former aspect, albeit to no greater effect than Schepisi's classic and with an excess of deadening anger, it is in the second area that she especially mishandles her material.

With Monster (2003) Patty Jenkins followed her heroine’s journey of self-determined vindication to its bitter but cathartic end. Kent allows Claire one bloody act of retribution but then backs off as this justifiably hate-filled woman abandons her mission, fumbling her chance to kill Hawkins and literally running off into the bush leaving Mangana to his captors. This in turn leads to those protracted meanderings already mentioned as Claire and Mangana go through various travails which are presumably on the one hand designed to show Claire’s female response to violence (the sword of revenge passes to Mangana) and, on the other, to give attention to the gradual thawing of the relationship between the pair (she is “The Nightingale”, his totem is the blackbird) as victims of British colonialism. As if to underline this loss of rigour Franciosi, unlike Theron in Monster, remains photogenic throughout, this despite being smashed in the face with the butt of a rifle early in the film then spending many days and nights in the bush (there is also a strange development late in the film when she and Mangana appear to be filmed as if against a back projection. Whether this was an artistic choice or the result of a technical problem I cannot say).

Both Franciosi and Ganambarr, the latter making his screen debut, are very good, as is Claflin as the sadistic Hawkins, not to mention the rest of the well-chosen cast. Those back-projected scenes aside, the film is beautifully photographed by Radek Ladczuk who also shot The Babadook.  Production and costume design, set and art direction are all top drawer but yet for all this Kent doesn’t achieve the brooding atmosphere and compelling tension that she achieved so resoundingly with her debut. 

Essentially all the elements were there for The Nightingale to be as strong as The Babadook and I suspect a relatively simple re-edit could have brought it to pass but it seems that Kent had too many axes to grind. Such is life.

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