"The Nightingale": a gothic thriller about genocide and revenge from the director "The Babadook"

At the Venice Film Festival there was a premiere of the film “The Nightingale” by Australian director Jennifer Kent. The main role — a woman who was exiled from Ireland to Tasmania for theft — was played by Aisling Franciosi, known for her role as Lianna Stark in Game of Thrones. I want to talk about how the director was able in one film to unite the cruel story of revenge, reflections on the development of a woman as a person and the history of the genocide of Australian Aborigines.

Claire has an amazingly beautiful voice, so the soldiers nicknamed her “The Nightingale.” She sings them songs of their native England and at home for her husband and newborn daughter - songs in their native Irish language. Among the listeners - always a handsome young man in uniform, Lieutenant Hawkins. He is in charge here, in an abandoned, far garrison on the Land of Van Diemen — so at the beginning of the 19th century, British colonists called Tasmania. The convicts, the worst of the worst, served their sentences there. Australians considered it a hell on earth.

Claire also committed an offense: she was hungry, she stole food and was condemned for it. Her term is long gone, but now she is a hostage and a slave lieutenant, who will not give her freedom. He likes her voice too much. Moreover, not just a voice. Hawkins regularly rapes her slave, she is silent for fear. One day a tragedy happens: Claire's husband and child are killed, and she is left completely alone: she no longer has anyone — not even the owner, who has left for the city to demand a promotion. Therefore, she takes a gun, saddles a horse and goes in search of killers.

Australian Jennifer Kent is the only female director in the Venice Festival competition, and her “The Nightingale” is one of the most talked about films of the program. This is only the second picture of Kent, but her debut “The Babadook” became a real event: women have not yet shot such successful horror songs. She, however, had someone to learn from. Having started her career as an actress, Kent decided to move on to directing after seeing “Dancer in the Dark” Lars von Trier. She wrote a letter to the Dane and literally asked for it either as an assistant or as an intern for the “Dogville” set. Then he hit the lovers of horror films “The Babadook”, which was preceded by a no less successful short film on the same theme “Monster”. “The Nightingale,” made four years later, returns the viewer Kent to Lars von Trier. The plot of the film dedicated to violence against a woman and her response to this violence directly refers to both Dancer in the Dark and Dogville, although the picture is completely different.

Kent has a rather original style. First, it focuses on its actors - and especially actresses - leaving them alone with the camera, forcing them to contact the viewer directly, talking about the fears, hopes, innermost and shameful desires of the heroines. Here, Aisling Franciosi, an Irish operatic background (and the performer of the role of Lianna Stark in The Game of Thrones), does something incredible. Secondly, it builds the space at the same time concrete and abstract, the entourage of which is historically correct, but makes you forget about the time of action and feel the modernity of what is happening (this is achieved by working on scenery, costumes and make-up, and through dialogues). Thirdly, it combines the intonation of the storyteller with extreme cruelty - but at the same time chastity - of the visual series.

The Babadook was a fantasy on the Hoffmanian Der Sandmann, The Nightingale refers to a more specific phenomenon — the so-called Tasmanian Gothic, in which the magical forces of nature are in chemical interaction with the vanishing Aboriginal culture and the oppressive atmosphere of the convict colony, "Dead house", has reached the size of the whole island. Gothic landscape, magical and frightening at the same time, Kent also creates a masterly. The forest in which her characters wander reminds of the monumental grove of Die Nibelungen: Siegfried Fritz Lang (Kent is especially fond of German expressionism), only the trees are not made by decorators or painted on a computer: they are real.

A shallow, inattentive look will see in The Nightingale another variation on the hackneyed theme of “female revenge” - like “Kill Bill”, only in another place and at another time. Or, even worse, speculation on fashionable material #MeToo is an obviously comic accusation, because the picture was made for several years, long before the appearance of the women's movement against violence and sexual harassment. In fact, this scary fairy tale overturns and turns the conventions of the genre inside out. Just as Lieutenant Hawkins and his doomed team of hanging soldiers wander off the road in the woods, the viewer wanders into a deceptively simple maze of picture, not knowing the full extent of what the director is leading to.

Claire’s protest against a merciless officer is more than a riot of a humiliated woman against her rapist. This is her attempt at the same time to achieve subjectivity and to find - for the first time in life, passing through the hearth of violence, fear and death of loved ones - her place in the world. It is not a particular villain. It turns out that there is no place for her in the literal sense of the word. In the English colony in the distant ocean, she is a woman, a prisoner, an Irish woman, who is doomed to suffering and inglorious destruction by civilization itself, by all its structure and logic.

It does not matter if good people or evil people meet on her way. All of them are her executioners and gravediggers. All except Billy, the same loner: a drinking aborigine from a tribe that has been completely destroyed the last speaker of his own language. Claire hires him as a conductor - of course, not by chance, (although she thinks otherwise). Through him, the film introduces the powerful theme of the genocide of Australian Aborigines - almost destroyed, humiliated, powdered, and still cherishing a plan for revenge. The path of Claire and Billy through the woods is a true plot of the film, halfway losing interest in questions and techniques of retribution.

Both Claire and Billy are limited in their abilities and actions. Strictly speaking, the first comer can shoot them down and go unpunished - especially if he is a white man. Moreover, to count on the kindness of strangers in the most cruel of worlds is not necessary. It is funny that their hierarchical difference saves them, although it is barely discernible: Claire is still a white man, even if she is female and without documents. When she portrays a guard with a gun, and Billy plays the role of an arrested person, others around him giggle approvingly and let them pass. Any volunteer participant in the mechanism of violence here is a welcome guest.