74 new york | july 22–august 4, 2019
while gazing on her like Sylvester does
Tweety Bird. When she begs her aristocratic
English patron, Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam
Claflin), for permission to move away with
her husband and adorable baby girl, he
indignantly reminds her that she’s his prop-
erty and, by way of demonstration, rapes
her. After Clare’s husband gets uppity,
Hawkins and two underlings (one slobbery,
one decent enough to blanch) descend on
the family’s shack and do just about the
worst thing you can ever do to anyone and
at gruel ing length.
Festival screenings in Sydney and Park
City, Utah, prompted walkouts and
denunciations—as well as denunciations of
the denunciations, suggesting that male
critics shouldn’t complain about the “crude-
ness” of a female director’s portrait of male
depravity through the ages. I’d say we should
agree to disagree, but the point is obviously
that we can’t disagree or else we’re behav-
ing—by default—like descendants of repres-
sive white male colonialists. Setting aside
said “crudeness,” the biggest disappoint-
ment for some of us who were over the
moon about Kent’s 2014 debut, The Baba-
dook, is the absence of metaphor. In that
splendid supernatural drama, the gurgling,
gurning storybook demon was a manifesta-
tion of a woman’s resentment toward her
child—plainly the upshot of societal pres-
sures on single moms—and its exorcism
wasn’t at the hands of a male churchman
but the result of a convulsive inner struggle.
The only inner struggle in The Nightingale
is when vengeful Clare, pursuing Hawkins
and his henchmen through the wilderness,
is forced to use a native guide called Billy
(Baykali Ganambarr) and hisses, “I’m not
travelin’ with a black!” Billy hates Clare back
until he learns she’s not English. She says,
“I hate the feckin’ English!” and they bond.
(She is the nightingale; he calls himself the
blackbird.) Meanwhile, Hawkins is incapa-
ble of going a mile through the woods with-
out raping or killing native women. He even
shoots a blubbering boy.
Kent makes some original visual choices.
She might have opted—in the grand Aussie
tradition—for a wide, expansive frame but
fashions one that’s boxy and underlit,
shrinking the distances and deepening the
blackness. There’s no escaping the rank-
ness: You can almost smell the blood-
soaked beds or the native children dangling
from trees. Franciosi (best known for the
series The Fall) turns her face into an aveng-
ing mask, which begins to melt after she
draws first blood, as if she’s realizing this
isn’t her but can’t turn back. The meander-
ing last half-hour (the film runs 136 min-
utes), in which Clare enters a sort of fugue
state while Billy sheds his Western clothes
and prepares for battle, can be viewed in dif-
ferent ways. Is it a sign of Kent’s irresolution
about the traditionally male revenge genre,
such that the (nonwhite) male must take
control of the narrative? It’s a fascinating
idea—that the true job of the female artist
is not to take up arms but to document his-
torical injustice for the daughters to come.which is my segue to For Sama, which
forsakes the panorama—what is Putin’s aim
in lending warplanes to Bashar al-Assad?
Why, with the world watching, would Assad
target civilians and hospitals?—for close-
ups of the consequences of “barrel bombs”
and chlorine gas. It’s a movie of close-ups of
terrible things, though the person holding
the camera isn’t a ghoul but a mother.At the outset, Waad al-Kateab explains
(to us, to her daughter in the future) that she
came to Aleppo to go to university and
stayed when the revolt against Assad flow-
ered, falling in love with a doctor (Hamza
al-Kateab) who was also a political activist.
Footage from the years-long stalemate (pre-
Putin), in which much of Aleppo was con-
trolled by revolutionaries, suggests a kind of
giddiness in simply living a “normal life”
among brave, like-minded idealists. (Waad
acknowledges the Islamist revolutionaries
who committed their own atrocities but
argues that their crimes were nothing com-
pared with Assad’s.) That giddiness extends
even to the onset of the final, months-long
siege in 2016, when the bombings begin—
then ends abruptly with the deaths of two
members of Waad and Hamza’s posse, seen
smiling and laughing seconds before. Like
that, the horror is real. Much of the film
takes place inside the hospital where, by the
end, 890 operations were performed in
20 days.
For Sama is also for the two stunned little
boys who weep over their brother (“We told
him to come inside!”) and quiver nearby as
their mother picks up the dead, wrapped
child and carries him off, screaming, “Don’t
take him from me! I won’t forgive you if you
do!” It’s for the little boy who asks his father
to tell him the story yet again of the building
on which a bomb fell—the Aleppo version of
“Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” It’s for the
young child of Waad’s best friend, who says,
“I want to be an architect so I can rebuild
Aleppo.” It’s for the baby born via Caesarean
without a pulse after its mother is dragged
from the rubble, the child plainly, irremedi-
ably dead. Until ... It should be for the girl
who lies still while her mother screams at her
to wake up and her father cries that they
were only on the street, trying to escape the
bombings, when the last bomb fell, for her.
Here is a testament to the movie’s power:
One of its less disturbing images is of a baby
dead amid the debris, because Waad says, in
voice-over, “I envy this boy’s mother. At least
she died before she had to bury her child.”
A mercy, indeed.
For Sama doesn’t feel like raw footage—it
has been carefully shaped, with a bit of
movie ish suspense during the final hours,
when the last of the families in East Aleppo
were told they could surrender to the regime
but were fired on anyway. The ending is a
little fancy for my taste—a montage of the
good times and an overhead shot of Waad
and her baby walking through the rubble. Of
course, For Sama isn’t for me, who watched
helplessly from afar along with millions of
others (including Obama’s distraught U.N.
envoy, Samantha Power) as Aleppo was
obliterated. It’s for that young architect of
tomorrow, and, of course, Sama. ■Aisling FranciosiPHOTOGRAPH: MATT NETTHEIM/CAUSEWAY FILMS