“Welcome to the world, full of misery from the bottom to the top.” In Jennifer Kent‘s undeniably overlong but beautifully imagined revenge fable “The Nightingale,” we are at the very bottom of the world, in early 19th century Tasmania, back when it was still called Van Diemen’s Land. And it does indeed feel like the miseries of the whole world have collected down here, in this sparsely populated purgatory, thickening the forests with gloom and weighing the skies with portent. It is literally a punishing place where the unwanted human detritus of the “civilized” world is sent to serve out sentences for cruel colonial masters driven even more barbarously violent by booze and isolation and suffocating racial hatred. In such a place, it’s a surprise that anything lovely can exist, but indentured servant girl Clare (striking, luminous newcomer Aisling Franciosi), walking from the hut she shares with her husband Aidan (Michael Sheasby) with her baby at her breast, is singing an Irish Gaelic lullaby in a voice so sweet and pure and good that it soars. You could almost miss the dagger in her hand.
READ MORE: Venice Film Festival Preview: 20 Most Anticipated Movies
Clare’s sentence ended some time ago but Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin, impressively committed to his character’s irredeemable awfulness) the British officer in erratic command of a motley crew of drunkards, boors and “fat-headed lobcocks,” will not release her. She is unlucky enough to be the object of his infatuation, forced to sing for him when he commands it, and then, in the first of the film’s many scenes of sexual violence, graphic and implied, she is raped by him and sent stumbling home to her husband and child thinking up excuses for the bruises on her body.
READ MORE: Toronto International Film Festival: 22 Most Anticipated Movies
Hawkins is angling for a promotion that will get him out of this backwater, but the visiting captain is less than impressed by him and his cronies, the vile Ruse (Damon Herriman) and the weakling Jago (Harry Greenwood). Learning that he is not going to get his recommendation, Hawkins determines to set out for Launceston and petition the powers-that-be for himself. But not before an escalating series of events leads him and his unmerry band to commit several unspeakable crimes against Clare and her family. Beaten, bloodied, and utterly bereft, Clare resolves to track the threesome down and kill them. But they have a headstart, and the journey to Launceston is several days through an impassably hostile territory. A friend suggests she hire an aboriginal guide, and though the suspicious and racist young woman balks initially (“would you see me boiled in a pot and eaten?”), eventually she relents, hiring tracker Billy (a terrific, soulful but lively Baykali Ganambarr, playing the sole character in the film with a sense of humor). Over the course of a journey that is punctuated with moments of peril and gruesome violence, mutual distrust gives way to understanding and the Irish nightingale and the Aboriginal “Mangana” (blackbird), both the last of their tribes, become friends.
READ MORE: 55 Must-See Films: The 2018 Fall Movie Preview
“The Nightingale” has glaring flaws even aside from a tone that can be too grim and pacing that gets baggier and looser as the film stretches unnecessarily in its final act. Hawkins is so rabidly villainous, he’s almost a cartoon grotesque — the demon of Van Diemen’s Land. In fact, all the white men they meet, with the sole exception of one brusque but kindly oldster, are repellent. This, of course, is designed to draw Clare and Billy closer together, with the Irish convict woman and the native black man discovering they have much in common in the oppression derby. But a few more shades of gray worked in to Kent’s script would have made it a more potent expression of righteous anti-colonial rage: the white men here are so monstrous that it’s hard to see them representing anything but outright, inborn evil, and the political points to be made here are more complex than that.
But there is far more to admire. The tangle of languages — Irish, English, Palawa Kani (a reconstructed amalgam of the lost languages of the indigenous Tasmanian tribes) — and the folk songs from various cultures are sensitively complemented by Jed Kurzel‘s eerie score. Radek Ladczuk‘s academy ratio cinematography is gorgeously pictorial, even when it contains horrors, and his lustrous close-ups of faces, especially Clare’s and Billy’s, give them iconic status, lending the genre-inflected revenge narrative its seedily resonant texture. The defrosting relationship between the two is also movingly and understatedly drawn — a scene of unexpected reunion, when each believes the other is likely dead or gone for good, is a heart-swelling but also sweetly shy moment, where they run toward each other as though to embrace but instead fall chastely into step side by side.
With all this evocative material available it’s unfortunate that Kent lavishes so much of the overgenerous runtime on repetitive and redundant plotting (there are at least two anti-climactic showdowns-that-don’t-show-down and a couple of retreats-to-the-woods that could be excised with nothing lost story-wise, and lots gained in terms of potency). The sean nós tradition of Irish folk song, where even the love songs sound like laments, is marked by a highly ornamented, intricate vocal style. But just like Franciosi’s clear-as-a-bell voice effortlessly updates that old-fashioned style to sound melodic and fresh to a modern ear, if Kent can get rid of some of the melismatic curlicues from her film, paring it back to its thrilling and beautiful essentials, then “The Nightingale” will really sing. [B/B+]
Check out all our coverage from the 2018 Venice Film Festival here.