I have just seen an Australian film like no other.

Samson and Delilah is an extraordinary piece of film. A lambent love story, a road movie about addiction, a powerful and profound statement about an exploited and largely ignored rural Aboriginal community, a stunning work of art that uses rarely any narrative/dialogue aids to make you engage with its story.

From the opening scene – jazzy, upbeat sounds of ‘Sunshinny Day’ pour out into a morning dawn – you awake with the 15yrold Samson as he reaches over to inhale from a petrol can.




Set in a tiny Aboriginal settlement in the Central Australian desert, the film tells the story of a burgeoning relationship between two teenagers; Samson, who spends most of his time languidly kicking up dirt and high on petrol, and Delilah, who looks after her mischievous, but ailing grandmother.

This is indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton’s feature debut and it’s a film you absolutely must see in the cinema. Magnificent skies and endless red plains stretch above a listless community in real poverty, whose daily rhythms match the stillness and almost silent tableaux’s of the films opening compositions and overall style.



Rowan McNamara as Samson

As the deadpan humour of the opening scenes moves into the gruelling road trip that follows, Thorton connects you to these (untrained actor) teenagers in remarkable and overwhelming ways. He achieves this almost entirely through visuals and terrific sound design (both playful and dissonant).

The effect is utterly absorbing cinema. Mesmorising, devastating and whilst there is also hope, the riveting story is even more powerful because of it’s refusal to obviously tug at your heartstrings. It just is. No small wonder it got the Camera D’Or in Cannes.

I urge you to see this film in the cinema! Beyond it’s clear achievement as contemporary, imaginative filmmaking, it also brings a realistic and unglorified Indigenous representation, rarely (if ever) seen in Australian cinema.

Marissa Gibson as Delilah

At its core, the story of the film is a unique boy-meets-girl story.
Might leave you bruised, but will leave you achin’ for more.


Cath

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 14th, 2009 at 1:56 pm and is filed under The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.