The Nightingale, written and directed by Jennifer Kent - Nine out of 10

The Nightingale, written and directed by Jennifer Kent

Nine out of 10

There are fabulous passages in the Nightingale, which have surely mesmerized audiences, the juries of various cinematic competitions, including the prestigious Venice Film Festival, where this motion picture has received the Special Jury Prize, awarded to the writer – director of the feature.

The Nightingale is Clare aka the fantastic Aisling Franciosi, an Irish woman who has been deported to Tasmania, a few years before 1825, when the story takes place, where she lives in squalor with her husband and their child, victim of the abuse of the monstrous lieutenant Hawkins, who has the power to prolong her detention and furthermore, to make her family suffer and to use this privilege to rape the poor woman.

Indeed, Clare’s husband confronts the lieutenant, without knowing the whole truth, the abominable acts committed by this disgusting creature against her, but then the antihero comes with his equally repellent and abhorrent sergeant, Ruse, and the soldier Ruse to the house of the heroine to cause a calamity, vicious and despicable scum that they are.

Hawkins rapes The Nightingale again, this time in front of the spouse who asks forgiveness and shouts at him to stop, hoping in vain that the subhuman would somehow find within him a spark of humanity, then invites Ruse to commit the same atrocity – he had expressed this desire before – and finally shoots the man dead.

Since their baby kept crying throughout the gruesome abuse suffered by his mother, the lieutenant shouts at Jago to stop him, the latter takes the boy in his arms, without any effect, shakes him and finally, swings the innocent infant and smashes his head against the wall.

They hit the mother with the butt of a rifle and abandon her, concerned as they are to reach another unit of the British Army, where the brute is looking for a different, better posting, which is located rather far, needing a tortuous journey through the Tasmanian forests, for which they need a native guide, people from the Aboriginal community, tortured, discriminated against and killed by the invaders.

Hawkins and all the other whites for that matter call the Aboriginal people ‘boy’, even when they are much older, as is the case of the native who takes them through the forest, to reach for the other side, as a sign of their contempt, racism and cruel injustice.

The Nightingale tries to get help and make the others bring the murderers to justice, but this is in vain, for it seems that the British Army – for which the undersigned has respect – has failed dismally in this instance, they allow killers to go free, up to the point where the vengeful mother and widow might get to the killers.

She has problems in enlisting Billy aka formidable Baykali Ganambarr as a guide, to allow her to catch up with the lieutenant and his party, following in their tracks, and hoping with vivid determination to pay back the tremendous suffering inflicted upon her.

If in the beginning the Aboriginal guide is hostile, for he has, together with his people, the owners of the land stolen by the damn whites, a long history of torture and killing at the hands of the Europeans that have traveled so far to take away everything that others kept for millennia, gradually, a bond is created between the Irish woman – she explains she is not English, on the contrary, she hates them too – and the native man.

On their journey into the forest, the English party makes yet more victims, for they catch a mother with her child, rape and kidnap her, only to kill their victim once they are surrounded by her native tribe, a moment when they shoot another member of the tribe and run.

Jago is wounded and Clare catches up with him, using her rifle to wound the killer of her baby in the leg, then fighting hand to hand with him, until she can use the knife and commit a fearsome, if justified to a great extent murder – on the one hand, this type of execution, albeit as a result of a fight, might be construed as murder, but on the other, this soldier had smashed the head of a baby against a wall…

Yes, he keeps crying that he did not want it, he is sorry, he tried to make him stop…but what else could he say?

For all the tension, the excitement and the horror of many of the scenes – including the one just mentioned in which the knife falls down repeatedly and then the rifle is used to make a masala of the head of the enemy, with blood sputtering over the head of the heroine, her dress, hands and all around – there are some segments which seem somewhat absurd, and the fact that the film goes on for more than two hours does not seem to add, but rather subtract from its value.

Nevertheless, The Nightingale is a memorable achievement and the story of this gritty, brave, determined, strong woman will remain with the public.