#The nightingale movie movie

After some early, prickly interactions (which made me fear we were headed for a Tasmanian Driving Miss Daisy ), the two come to a deeper understanding of each other’s predicaments. The Nightingale clearly draws parallels between Clare’s experience and that of Billy, whose entire country has been raped and pillaged by the British. Still, the explicitness undoubtedly forces you to face the brutal trauma that was inflicted upon women in this particular time and place-indeed, has been inflicted throughout history. There has been debate over the graphic depiction of violence in the film, which is sickening and unblinking. The villains verge on cartoonish Clare’s transition from victim to angel of vengeance is abrupt. Much of The Nightingale is broadly drawn and underlined more than it needs to be. After a violent assault leaves her devastated and nearly dead, she pursues the offenders into the wilderness in search of revenge, convincing an Aboriginal tracker named Billy (Baykali Ganambarr) to serve as her guide. In The Nightingale, a mother might be the spook.Īisling Franciosi stars as Clare, an Irish convict in 1825 Tasmania who-though married and the mother of an infant-is still under the service of a cruel British military officer (Sam Claflin). In that 2014 film, a malevolent specter haunted a grieving mother and her child. In The Nightingale, the profound losses Clare suffers, from her body to her loved ones, propel her toward vengeance.The Nightingale works best as a ghost story, which should come as no surprise to those familiar with writer-director Jennifer Kent’s debut feature, The Babadook. Many of those movies used the titillation of sexual violence to empower their characters.

45 and I Spit on Your Grave, to different ends. With The Nightingale, Kent has adapted a history of rape-revenge thrillers, like Ms. The panic attack waiting to happen broke through, and I had to get some fresh air. The moment Verhoeven said he saw his film as a comedy during the post-screening Q&A, I bolted. Watching Elle at the New York Film Festival in 2016 left me on the verge of tears and sick to my stomach. The trope of sexualized rape is heightened in Verhoeven’s film, but not limited to it it is rooted in a destructive myth created and perpetuated by systemic misogyny. The twist, of course, is that she enjoys being raped. Verhoeven staged his character’s sexual assault with a thirsty lens that leered at its victim and sexualized her pain. A number of critics loved this movie, but I am not one of them. Instead, she decides to track down her rapist and get back at him by instigating a power play of her own. She’s shaken but does not go to the police. Within the film’s first few minutes, the lead character (Isabelle Huppert) is raped in her home. Photo by Matt Nettheim)īoth Share and The Nightingale starkly contrast with the representation of rape in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle. The protagonist doesn’t remember what happened that night, so the audience does not see with an unflinching gaze, as in The Nightingale.Īisling Franciosi as “Clare” in Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale (Courtesy of IFC Films. Bianco creates distance and detachment by presenting it mostly through grainy cell phone videos or dimly lit scenes.

#The nightingale movie movie

Pippa Bianco’s recent HBO movie Share, for instance, deals with the sexual assault of a high school girl who drank too much at a party. How such an extreme violation as sexual assault is filmed, edited, and composed differs greatly among filmmakers. Had Kent’s film crossed a line into exploitation? Should these brutally violent scenes have even been in the movie? I don’t believe there are easy answers to these questions. These stomach-churning moments prompted discussion almost as soon as The Nightingale premiered. It’s haunting and uncomfortable to watch and it is meant to be that way. She did not attenuate the screams of the main character, Clare (Aisling Franciosi), nor does her script sidestep the terror or her camera look away as Clare’s face contorts through the stages of fear, fight, pain, and finally, defeated resignation. Warning: this article contains an in-depth discussion of sexual assault.įew film directors in recent memory have addressed sexual assault with as much agonizing detail as has Jennifer Kent in her latest film, The Nightingale. Aisling Franciosi appears in The Nightingale by Jennifer Kent, an official selection of the Spotlight program at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival (Courtesy of Sundance Institute.