Film review: Samson and Delilah

Director Warwick Thornton
With Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson
Released 2 April

Cinema hasn't been kind to Australian Aborigines. American Indians—to name another native race that was decimated by white settlers—have received a fair amount of attention from guilt-ridden Hollywood directors, but an Aborigine on the silver screen is lucky to be anything more than a sidekick for Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee, or an adopted son for Nicole Kidman in Baz Luhrmann's Australia.

Samson and Delilah goes some small way towards redressing the balance. The Camera d'Or winner at last year's Cannes, and Australia's candidate for this year's Oscars, it's an intimate, taciturn drama that focuses on two teenagers in a tiny outback shanty town. But it has as much to say about the plight of Aborigines as whichever tub-thumping historical epic must surely be in the pipeline.

The characters' energy seems to have evaporated in the baking sunshine. Samson (Rowan McNamara) does nothing all day, every day, except mooching around, blotting out his boredom by sniffing petrol fumes. Delilah (Marissa Gibson) has slightly more to do with her time: she helps her grandmother paint the colourful canvases which she then sells to an agent for a few hundred dollars, and which a distant gallery sells for quite a few thousand.

This numbing routine looks set to continue indefinitely, but when Delilah's grandmother dies, she and Samson drive away to Alice Springs in the hope of a better life together. Once they're there, with no money, no home and no mode of communication with the people around them, Delilah suffers every possible indignity while Samson lies slumped under a road bridge, as feeble as his biblical namesake after that fateful haircut. There are glimmers of hope, but only glimmers.

It's not an easy film to watch. Warwick Thornton, the writer-director, doesn't compromise in depicting the deadly repetitiveness of his protagonists' existence, which is another way of saying that it takes a while for anything dramatic to happen. He's also faithful to a culture in which emotion is largely unspoken, and so the eloquent declarations of love and pleas for justice that we've been conditioned to expect never arrive, and the odd sideways glance has to suffice. Indeed, the most harrowing events occur offscreen, and are never discussed afterwards.

But none of this is a criticism. Like its characters, the film doesn't try to make its points too explicitly, instead presenting a shocking situation in simple, stark, almost matter-of-fact terms, and leaving us to wrestle with the implications. It's all the more powerful for it.

Nicholas Barber