T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 7, 2019| 15
culture
“Whore!”
The word came sailing out of a man’s
mouth after a screening of Jennifer
Kent’s latest movie, “The Nightingale,”
at the Venice Film Festival last year. At
first, Kent thought the livid viewer must
be joking: The heroine of “The Nightin-
gale,” an Irish convict in 1820s Tasma-
nia, is called a whore by her tormentors
all through the film.
But the man wasn’t joking; he had
hollered other angry phrases like
“Shame on you!” He turned out to be a
journalist and later apologized, and
though the festival responded by revok-
ing his credentials, the vitriol directed at
Kent and her movie proved a harbinger
of reactions to come.
In June, the film made headlines
again, after a few dozen people in Aus-
tralia walked out of showings at the Syd-
ney Film Festival, one incensed woman
shouting about the film’s portrayal of
rape. Others took to Twitter to condemn
the brutality borne onscreen by Aborigi-
nal people.
Kent, the auteur of the spooky 2014
breakout hit “The Babadook,” struggled
with the reactions as well as the media’s
coverage, which she said distorted how
Australians received the film. The Syd-
ney Film Festival had added an extra
screening to meet heightened ticket de-
mands, critics variously described it as
harrowing but essential viewing, and an
audience had given it a standing ovation
months earlier in Adelaide.The controversy raised questions
about how stories involving rape should
be told — and by whom. While depic-
tions of rape onscreen have unleashed
storms of criticism in recent years, the
debates were about stories almost ex-
clusively created and directed by men.
Was Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 feature,
“Elle,” starring Isabelle Huppert as a
rape victim who becomes attracted to
her attacker, misogynistic or feminist?
Were the numerous sexual assaults in
“Game of Thrones” gratuitous at best?
“The Nightingale” is also set in a time
and place that historians describe as
even more grim than the world Kent cre-
ated onscreen, and several critics
praised the film as a rare example of
horrific violence done right.
“One way to look at the world is, ‘If I
turn away from all the suffering, it does-
n’t exist,’” Kent said in a recent Skype
interview from her home in Brisbane,
Australia. “The other way is to look at it
boldly in the face, and let it into your
head, and see how it feels, and be moti-
vated to be a more loving, compassion-
ate person.”
In “The Nightingale,” the convict
Clare, played by Aisling Franciosi
(Lyanna Stark in “Game of Thrones”)
sets out into the unforgiving Tasmanian
wilderness to avenge atrocities commit-
ted against her and her family by an
English officer, played by Sam Claflin
(the “Hunger Games” films), and his un-
derlings. She is accompanied by an Ab-
original tracker named Billy, played by
the first-time actor Baykali Ganambarr,
whose performance earned the best
new talent award in Venice.
The film has been broadly character-
ized as a revenge tale, but it is more nu-
anced than that. Revenge tales typically
have a catharsis. “The Nightingale”
looks at what happens after revenge is
exacted, and the toll it takes when you
try to rid yourself of pain by inflicting it
on others. Kent latched onto these
themes in response to a modern-dayworld filled with outrage and lashing
out.
“I wanted to see what are the other
options,” she said, “because clearly
we’re going to end our humanity if we
choose revenge as an option contin-
uously.”
The idea of the story started small,
decades ago, when Kent visited Tasma-
nia, off Australia’s southeastern coast,
with her first serious boyfriend.
Tasmania is wildly different from the
mainland’s vast bushland swaths. It is
colder and greener, more like Scotland
or Ireland, and, in Kent’s view, suffused
with a deep sadness that she wanted to
explore.
In the 1800s, female convicts were
sent by the shipload to the island, thenknown as Van Diemen’s Land, usually
for far lesser crimes than men. Men also
outnumbered them nine to one. Visiting
a former prison, Kent saw the cold, dark
solitary cells where women were con-
fined, in total sensory deprivation, for
weeks at a time. She learned that after
their release, some deliberately commit-
ted crimes to be sent right back in.
“So of course my mind was thinking,
‘What on earth was it that was worse
than that, that made them want to flee
and return to the darkness?’” Kent said.
Kent worked as an actress and acting
teacher for years before turning to film-
making. After serving as a production
assistant on Lars von Trier’s “Dogville,”
she made a short film, “Monster”
(2005), that she developed into a fea-ture, “The Babadook,” about a widowed
mother contending with a demon that
has sprung from the pages of her son’s
picture book. Though it made just $
million worldwide, it put Kent on the
map not only as a director, but also as an
artist who could plumb the recesses of
female fury.
“Women’s rage is immense, and
there’s an ocean of it,” she said. “It’s not
hard, being a woman, to find reasons to
have rage.”
To ensure the veracity of “The
Nightingale,” she asked Jim Everett, a
Tasmanian Aboriginal elder, playwright
and activist, to serve as an adviser. He
initially said he had no time, but then
read the script and couldn’t say no.
“People are realizing this country hasa history that has been hidden from it, a
history that a lot of people won’t accept,”
Everett said, speaking by phone from
Tasmania. “They can’t say it’s not there
because it’s in the records. This is a dis-
cussion that Australia needs to have.”
Everett advised Kent on the body
paint, clothes and shell necklaces worn
by the Indigenous Australian actors, as
well as their ceremonies, customs and
language. One criticism lobbed at the
film was that it was a white empow-
erment tale propped up by cruelties in-
flicted on black bodies. Yet Kristyn Har-
man, an author and professor of Aborigi-
nal history at the University of Tasma-
nia, described British colonial tactics
against the Indigenous Australian peo-
ple of the time as genocidal.
“Tens of thousands were in fact
killed,” she said. “Sometimes people
boasted of these killings.”
Coverage of the walkouts at the Syd-
ney Film Festival converged on a single
line reportedly shouted by a woman as
she left the theater: “She’s already been
raped,we don’t need to see it again.” For
Kent, there was no way to tell a story
about what happened to female convicts
in colonial Tasmania without including
rape. Deborah Swiss, the author of “The
Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Aus-
tralia’s Convict Women,” said sexual as-
sault was threaded through their lives.
“There was horrific discrimination
against the Irish,” Swiss said, “and the
convict maids lived in a culture of rape
and violence.”
Kent said she did not believe in up-
holding taboos against talking about or
depicting sexual violence onscreen.
“Speaking from my perspective, and
having done a lot of research, the way is
not to sweep things under the carpet,”
Kent continued. “If a woman or anyone
who has a painful experience and they
can talk about it, that’s a miracle. Andthat’s all I wanted to say with the film.
That ultimately we shouldn’t turn away
from these things.”
In preparation for her role, Franciosi
spent time with sexual assault victims
and worked closely with a psychologist
on set. During the rape scenes, Kent
kept the camera focused closely on the
victim’s face; her intent was to make the
viewer experience the violence, too.
“What you really have to reckon with is,
this is a human being,” Franciosi said.
Some of the scenes left the production
crew in tears. Ganambarr said he would
hear the screams and cower. After pro-
duction wrapped, Franciosi canceled
travel plans and instead stayed home
for two months in Dublin, where she
dreamed every night that she was still
on set and sometimes woke up crying.
When controversy about the film first
swirled, Franciosi took to Twitter in the
director’s defense, expressing what
both she and Kent would come to be-
lieve: that the filmmaker was facing
heightened wrath because she was a
woman. “Double. Standards.” Franciosi
wrote.
At the final, sold-out screening at the
Sydney Film Festival, several audience
members said they had been drawn in
by reports of outraged walkouts at pre-
vious showings. This time, though, ev-
eryone remained seated. Afterward,
several young viewers said the film had
relayed a version of their country’s his-
tory that had never made it into their
childhood schoolbooks.
“I think it’s a really dark chapter of
Australian history that deserves to be
read,” said Sarah O’Keefe, 19, a film and
communications student at the Univer-
sity of Sydney. She added that she found
the violence “graphic but not gratu-
itous,” and that it was “integral to the
plot” and “wholly considerate of the vic-
tim.”
“I was shocked, I was confronted, I
was horrified,” O’Keefe said. “But I
thought it was a fantastic movie.”When a woman puts rape onscreen
Genevieve Jia Ling Finn contributed re-
porting from Sydney, Australia.Jennifer Kent directed
‘The Nightingale,’ drawing
both anger and praiseBY CARA BUCKLEYKASIA LADCZUK/IFC FILMSCHANTAL ANDERSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESAisling Franciosi, above, as a convict in
19th-century Tasmania in “The Nightin-
gale.” Jennifer Kent, far left, directed the
film. Left, Kent with Franciosi on the set.MATT NETTHEIM/IFC FILMSThe film has been characterized
as a revenge tale, but it is more
nuanced than that. Such tales
typically have a catharsis.Writers have their pet themes, favorite
words, stubborn obsessions. But their
signature, the essence of their style, is
felt someplace deeper — at the level of
pulse. Style is first felt in rhythm and
cadence, from how sentences build and
bend, sag or snap. Style, I’d argue, is
90 percent punctuation.
“Maman died today. Or yesterday
maybe, I don’t know.” “For a man of his
age, 52, divorced, he has, to his mind,
solved the problem of sex rather well.”
“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s ven-
om.”
Every sentence is a performance, or
should be, and punctuation sets the
stage. It signals the rise and fall of the
curtain, provides the special effects,
etches out the grain in the voices we
recognize above as Camus, J. M. Coet-
zee, Toni Morrison — even inductingus into the themes and tone of the
novels. See those ironic commas in
Coetzee’s “Disgrace” sequestering “to
his mind” or the opening lines of Mor-
rison’s “Beloved,” with one sentence
sliced so suddenly, jaggedly into two.
In “Semicolon,” Cecelia Watson
reveals punctuation, as we practice it,
to be a relatively young and uneasy
art. Her lively “biography” tells the
story of a mark with an unusual talent
for controversy. “The semicolon is a
place where our anxieties and our
aspirations about language, class and
education are concentrated,” she
writes. “In this small mark big ideas
are distilled down to a few winking
drops of ink.”
Ink, blood and bile. In 1837, two
University of Paris law professors
clashed over a question of semicolon
usage and decided to settle the matter
with a duel. A rogue semicolon drifted
into the retranscription of an early
20th-century statute, causing liquor
service to be suspended in Boston for
six years.
In 1945, a semicolon inserted into the
definition of war crimes in the Charter
of the International Military Tribunal
threatened to halt the prosecution ofcaptured Nazis until the ambiguous
sentence was clarified.
Why such confusion? The modern
semicolon was invented in Venice, in
1494, by the printer and publisher
Aldus Manutius, and, for much of
history, it had no strictly defined func-
tion. It acted like a musical notation,
allowing for a pause somewhere be-
tween the beat of a comma and a colon
(hence its mongrel design). Only later
was it systematized and given two
primary uses.
The first is uncontroversial. The
semicolon keeps a sentence tidy by
separating items in a list already clut-
tered with commas. (The band played
shows in Richmond, Va.; Memphis,
Tenn.; and Asheville, N.C.). The second
function has caused all the strife. Here,
the semicolon takes the place of a
period and yokes together two inde-
pendent clauses that could function as
sentences on their own. (The band is
terrible; I regret following them on
tour.)
In this second capacity, semicolons
are discretionary. They add shading,
allow one thought to ripen into another.
Few have used the mark more liberally
and eccentrically, or more beautifullydescribed its psychological effect, than
Virginia Woolf. From the Lily Briscoe
section of “To the Lighthouse,” describ-
ing Lily’s summers with the Ramsay
family: “Such was the complexity of
things. For what happened to her,
especially staying with the Ramsays,
was to be made to feel violently two
opposite things at the same time;that’s what you feel, was one; that’s
what I feel, was the other, and then
they fought together in her mind, as
now.” Semicolons allow these senti-
ments to flow together — to jostle and
harmonize — in one sentence the way
they would in one mind.
To a varietal of writer, often Ameri-
can, the technique is pure offense.
“The most pusillanimous, sissified,
utterly useless mark of punctuation
ever invented,” the grammarian James
J. Kilpatrick declared. “All they do is
show you’ve been to college” (Kurt
Vonnegut). “Ugly as a tick on a dog’s
belly” (Donald Barthelme).
Sissified. If only the source of the
anxiety weren’t so mysterious.
Semicolons are not your workaday
periods and commas. They belong to
the family of trills and volutes; they
exist for the sake of complexity, beauty,
subtle connections. Cardinal virtues,
I’d say, but Watson traces the warring
(and gendered) camps of prose style —
a fixation on clarity and directness
versus a curled sensibility, one inter-
ested in the fertile territories of ambi-
guity.
Watson covers impressive ground in
this short book, skittering back andforth like a sandpiper at the shores of
language’s Great Debates. There are
fascinating forays into how grammari-
ans “created a market for their rules,”
the strange history of diagramming
sentences and the racial politics of
so-called standard English. Watson is
sharpest when acting a bit like a semi-
colon herself, perceiving subtle connec-
tions and burrowing into an argument.
Whatever her subject, her targets are
always pedants, those acolytes of
“actually,” all those who profess to love
language but seek only to control it.
Self-appointed grammar “sticklers”
and “snobs” “want so much to get back
to that point in the past where the
majority of people respected language
and understood its nuances,” she
writes. “That place is a mirage. There
was no time when everyone spoke
flawless English and people punctuat-
ed ‘properly.’”
Does this mean anything goes? Not
in the least. Watson opposes conven-
tions only as they exist to spare us
from thinking. Don’t just learn the
rules, her clever, curious book prompts
us; learn to ask, whose rules(and to
admire that semicolon while you’re at
it).A pause isn’t easy; it sows complexity
BOOK REVIEWSemicolon: The Past, Present,
and Future of a Misunderstood Mark
By Cecelia Watson. Illustrated. 213 pp.
Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $19.99.BY PARUL SEHGALCecelia Watson.TOMILA KATSMANРРrecognize above as Camus, J. M. Coet-recognize above as Camus, J. M. Coet-
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