Directed by Warwick Thornton. Starring Marissa Gibson, Rowan McNamara, Scott Thornton 15A cert, IFI/Light House/Screen, 101 min
IT’S NOT too often that cinema provides us with something entirely unexpected. But Warwick Thornton, making his feature debut, has, however, offered just such a surprise with his moving, funny, weird drama following a dangerous odyssey by two troubled young indigenous Australians.
We’ve seen dialogue-shy folk dramas featuring non-professional actors before – those Iranians do little else – but it’s bracing to encounter a film that combines cinematic austerity with such a strong emotional punch. And it’s funny to boot.
We begin in an isolated hamlet some distance from Alice Springs. Samson, a hopeless petrol sniffer, spends his days pestering the local rock band and pretending not to fancy the marginally more responsible Delilah. He throws rocks at her. She sourly flings a bag of beef jerky in his direction. Nobody who has ever been (or seen) a teenager will be in any doubt that they are crazy about one another.
Things turn serious when, following separate castigations from intransigent elders, Samson and Delilah rob a car and make for the comparatively busy streets of Alice. There they are shunned by white tourists who have come to get close – but not that close – to the ruggedness of the outback. Indigenous art, mounted in stark frames, sold in sleek stores, is all very well. Indigenous citizens are something else altogether.
The sociopolitical message is clear, but it rarely strays away from its home in the shallow subtext. More than anything else, Samson & Delilahis a love story, and the starkness of its telling, uncluttered and unfettered, only adds to its impressive universality.
Drawing quiet, rough-edged performances from his two leads, employing steady unfussy 35mm photography, Thornton (his own cinematographer) eventually makes something almost mythological of his tale.
If the film has a predecessor
it may be Lenny Abrahamson's Adam & Paul, but, though Samson & Delilahshares that Irish film's taste for narcotic picaresque, it is somewhat more romantic and optimistic. At any rate, young Mr Thornton has proved that he's one to watch in the new decade.
