In Kent’s beautifully balanced and exquisitely shot film, this is the best you can do for someone without negating their experience or agency. All they can do is act based on what they gather from their own specific, unique perspective. They cannot begin to fully understand each other’s trauma. Production/Financing Companies: Made Up Stories, Causeway Films, Screen Australia, Screen Tasmania, South Australian Film Corp. These are two characters on parallel paths, dealing with parallel demons. Directed by Mélanie Laurent, it is based on a novel of the same name and stars Dakota Fanning and Elle Fanning as sisters during World. Though Clare eventually comes to like him, their bond is not symbolic of some wider, ahistorical breakthrough, and the film never tries to equate her experience of sexism with his dealings of racism. The Nightingale is set to be released on December 22, 2021. Kent further obstructs the impulse to find someone to identify with, root for and hold on to in this world of pain by portraying Clare as a racist through her interactions with indigenous tracker Billy (Baykali Ganambarr). But perhaps more importantly, the length and specificity of that sequence also challenge our desire to “relate”: though we certainly feel bad for Clare, her assault and story are hers alone. As such, the director does not reduce Clare’s rape to a mere narrative device – a break, a demarcation without consistency. Kent emphasises the specificity of Clare’s story throughout, most clearly when she shows us the assault in a long, uninterrupted sequence, rendering both its moment-to-moment terror and the details which make it unique. Rather, the film centres on the experience of sexual violence on a purely individual level. And it isn’t an allegory like Coralie Fargeat’s stylised and emotionally heightened 2017 film, Revenge.
It does not take the familiar narrative turns which allow viewers to take refuge from the horror as it plays out on screen. When her family is killed by a rogue band of British soldiers (led by Sam Claflin’s short-tempered and vicious Hawkins) who rape her and leave her for dead, Clare sets off on a dangerous journey across the Australian bush to find and kill her attackers.īut this is not a rape-revenge movie. Set in Tasmania circa 1825, the film centres on Clare (Aisling Franciosi), an Irish convict living in a British penal colony with her husband and infant child. The Nightingale is a refreshing, necessary reminder that sexual violence isn’t just a trendy topic that exists solely in the abstract, but is primarily something experienced which cannot be reduced to a film trope or easily prevented in real life. A director does not win feminist points by cancelling out a sexist element in their film with an engineered “clapback”. But none of these elements on their own are objectionable.Ĭinema is not a numbers game, and a film is not the sum of its parts. The film features scenes of rape and murder, centres on a character who is not entirely sympathetic, and does not make things right by the end.
a movie that was made possible by a great deal of talent behind and in front of the camera.Jennifer Kent follows up The Babadook with a gruelling yet vital portrait of colonialism in 19th century Tasmania.įollowing 2014’s maternally-oriented ghost story The Babadook, director Jennifer Kent’s second feature The Nightingale has proved far more divisive with critics, many of them decrying its representations of sexual violence as gratuitous. Their emotional adventures make for a moving and inspiring book and movie. They must deal with everything from dwindling food supplies and the loss of a job to being hunted down by the Nazis. The sisters in this story are separated, captured, abused and persecuted.
Violence against women is also at the forefront as mentioned above. In April 2020, though, TriStar announced that The Nightingale would be coming out at the end of this year. It is the prevalent theme in this movie and, while it’s not fun, it is important to see these stories being told. In 2020, that date was pushed back again, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, the project was taken off the release calendar completely. In 2017, after filming took place in Budapest, Hungary and Los Angeles, California, the film was set to come out on August 10, 2018. The novel was first acquired back in 2015, by TriStar Pictures. Laurent, the director of The Nightingale, has also been seen on the big screen in works such as Now You See Me and Inglourious Basterds, and Elle worked with her on Galveston in 2018, a film that marked Laurent's directorial debut.