Change Your Image
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Reviews
Samson & Delilah (2009)
Maybe art should kick you in the guts
I felt this film like a kick in the guts, and as I gasped for breath, the film embraced me with the restorative power of earth and human kindness. It might be going too far, however, to claim that the film shows the redemptive power of love, or to suggest that the absence of dialogue heralds a new and visual cinematic style.
I want to suggest that the absence of dialogue is, in this case, part of the work of art that contributes to portrayal of a world in which (after Spivak) those who are subordinated cannot speak.
As provoking as this film is, the outcome of a work of art is unpredictable and uncontrollable. It is not a documentary. A low budget film, short on actors. This world has no peers for the teenage protagonists. They are alone and outside, even in their own community. Both are beaten and cast out. The music played by Samson's brothers is played by wrote, without a spark. Delilah's role is to care for her grandmother. The daily routine passes, sunrise after sunset, suggesting more than literal time passes.
Take some of the visual imagery. The earth is lived in. The opening shot features the curtain lilting in the breeze, the image chillingly alters when Samson sits up to sniff solvents. Samson bathes in the sandy creek bed, his art is to kill a kangaroo, a cute travel documentary style shot of the animal is followed by his effortless art in killing it for food. The canvas on which Delilah and her grandmother paint is a part of daily life, to sit on, stand on, sleep on. The value of art in other hands cannot be comprehended or, despite a price tag, measured. Artists have always been outsiders, exploited.
Does the film show courtship or freeloading? Delilah starts as carer, with a purpose, loses that purpose and acquiesces, and only regains her purpose as carer at the end. The boy walks on in a daze while, pantomime-like, she is dragged off and raped, or struck by a car, in full view of the audience but behind his back. Her apparent return from the dead provides him with salvation, but not necessarily redemption. The curious Christian imagery – the church turns her away (or she forsakes the church), yet she places a cross of twigs inside the rough stockman's hut in the closing sequence. Indeed the curious European imagery of the closing sequence leaves you wondering.
The image of the first stone hitting her back still strikes – you know that must have hurt. The cutting of her hair, the sound of the serrated knife – you don't need to know the customs (or indeed if there is a custom or a mythic reference) to feel what it means. The sequence at the end when she bathes him in the stock trough, white soap on his black skin, the first (maybe second) time she has touched him in the entire film. The rifle crack when she shoots a kangaroo for food. She has rediscovered the power of having a purpose, not the power of love.
L'educazione sentimentale di Eugénie (2005)
A tame representation of Sade
Like the previous reviewer I was a little disappointed. I have read about Sade (but not the work in question), as a result of reading the play 'Marat-Sade' and viewing the film (Peter Brook, 1973). For a film made in 2005, 'Eugenie' was very coy about the sex scenes. What else could the filmmakers do? Thankfully the sequences cut before descending into soft porn, and to go further would only have been porn. But is that what Sade's 'philosophy' reduces to? It does seem that the portrayal of Eugenie is a little ingenuous, but the film does its best to portray the view that desire is natural and the order imposed by church and state unnatural. I feel, however, that Sade was not simply making a point, but by his whole life and work was setting out to thumb his nose at society and instigate outrage. Where can a film adaptation in 2005 go with that theme in a world in which television teen comedies and sitcoms contain more outrageous (and more understated) comedies that satirise contemporary mores? I think Sade would have liked, for example 'Holy Smoke' (Jane Campion, 1999). Grimaldi has made the story into a period film, tastefully shot with limited settings. The problem is that the story in 2005 does not do what Sade was (apparently) trying to do in his time. But never mind, we can still refer to his work and decide what the film means for us now. Perhaps Eugenie's (unconvincingly acted) insight was not the recognition of, and abandonment to, 'desire' but the opportunity to rebel against the oppression of her mother? Freedom by coercion meets freedom by rebellion? These issues are 'unfinished cultural business' that still resonate today, and the film, although disappointing in many ways, provokes the viewer to respond to these issues in the viewer's own way, so I see some value in it.
They're a Weird Mob (1966)
Nothing is real in this world that wasn't, except ...
I loved John O'Grady's books, and laughed myself silly, in my early teens in Australia. The books presented a world that was unknown to me, of Aussie battlers and the land of the "fair go" - Australia's first pizza house had not yet opened - the hardship of the 1962 recession passed me by as I dutifully went to and from high school, oblivious to the pressures that caused both my parents health to fail. I didn't know anyone who spoke like O'Grady's characters, but the caricature was funny, and the romantic plot was pure Jane Austen.
As a fifteen year old, I loved the film. Today, as I watched it again on DVD, the gulf of time is horrifying. The obsessive colourless and characterless household interiors of the battlers and toffs alike is scarily real. The funniest scene is afternoon tea with the men unable to pick up a meringue without crushing it.
The pointless bravado of slang that is impenetrable to outsiders. Why is it funny? The overt humour of making fun of those not in the know rebounds and we are left pathetically trying to be different. I still can't tell the difference between a schooner and a midi - just ask for a bigger glass of beer if that is what you want, because the pubs closed at 6 o'clock.
That this slang-based "look at us" humour is not a thing of the past also stuns me - think of the 1990s verse novel and film "The Monkey's Mask" - the book was published overseas with a glossary of archaic authentic Aussie words that most of us never use, and it is hard not to cringe when they appear on screen - both films play the travelogue card, with many scenic shots of Syndey and that damned opera house still unfinished. I'm not envious, I'm really not.
Still amazed what this time capsule tells us about the fictional world of Australia in the 1960s - but I'm still bound to love it because it would be unbearable to destroy my 15 year old idyll.
The documentary on the DVD was also stunning - the film meant something to Michael Powell and Walter Chiari, about egalitarianism and the "fair go" - easy to say, but still so much harder to live by.