Samson and Delilah
If it’s possible to pack a wallop at the same time as being quiet and unassuming, Warwick Thornton’s first full-length feature does it.
“Samson and Delilah” has been selected for this year’s Cannes International Film Festival and I expect it will wow audiences there, as it should and hopefully will here in Oz.
It is at heart a simple love story. Samson and Delilah are Aboriginal teenagers living in a community outside Alice Springs. Both have been damaged by neglect and other unspecified tragedies; Delilah ekes out an existence caring for her grandmother and helping the old woman with the paintings she sells to a white gallery owner from town. Needless to say, he is making all the profit. Samson, utterly alone, spends his days sniffing petrol and aimlessly kicking about in an abandoned wheelchair.
I know all this sounds very depressing but here’s the odd thing – this film is not a downer. Thornton, an Aboriginal filmmaker who himself grew up around Alice Springs, shows us life for these people from the inside. So there is wit, charm, simple beauty and quite a few laugh-out-loud moments as well as the inevitable violence and misery. And all of it is held together with the complete integrity only a member of such a community can have.
The leads are played by two untrained actors, Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson, children from the community depicted in the film, who give wondrous performances. Both of them are beautiful and Thornton photographs them to show that beauty despite the grimness of their lives.
In its own way, this delicate film echoes “Once Were Warriors’, the New Zealand film made some years ago that told it like it is for many Maori today. It deserves the same level of recognition not because it’s the sort of film we “should” see but because it’s a brilliant piece of work in its own right. Go see it, and take your kids too.
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