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Issue # 1410  13 May 2009
Film Review
Samson and Delilah
Alice Springs film maker Warwick Thornton describes his latest film Samson and Delilah as his “good fight”, his “reason for being”. And it shows.
Thornton’s heart and soul manifest themselves in exquisite images on the screen which are so unhindered by dialogue it is almost a silent film.
As young actor Marissa Gibson who plays Delilah says: “Aboriginal people don’t say very much, we just use body language”.
Relentless and profound, this small scale film spares nobody – art dealers, governments, Aboriginal family relationships, white Alice Springs cafe goers. Everybody is complicit in the misery that has befallen these two symbols of Aboriginal youth.
We are all responsible for the plight of these two young people who, unlike their many real life counterparts, narrowly avert tragedy.
While Thornton spares nobody, he is equally tough on himself – not a sound, not an image, is used which doesn’t support the stark and frightening reality of Samson and Delilah.
It is so unrelenting and sparse that the audience is herded, like Samson and Delilah and many Aboriginal people in Central Australia, on a bleak and inexorable journey only made bearable by scenes of delicate and exacting beauty.
Samson’s brother’s band, which plays on the outstation every day, thrums out the same music – day in, day out – pounding out the boredom, the monotony of life on this remote outstation into the bleached dust.
Those reggae rhythms, commonly heard on nearly every Central Australian community, become a powerful symbol of the smallness of their world.
The cycle of debt and poverty are played out through the art dealers who prey on Delilah’s grandmother.
The potent juxtaposition of her famous artist Nana’s paintings in a smart gallery in town and Delilah’s own desperate attempts to sell her own paintings to silent coffee drinkers at a cafe is a damning indictment of the Aboriginal art industry and its hypocrisies.
Thornton is so skilled at storytelling that the audience’s relationship with Samson and Delilah is maintained despite the cultural chasms between them.
Relentless to the end, redemption, for these two, is at hand only as a tough alternative and a very last resort.
Thornton will pick up many awards for his small masterpiece.
Land Rights News 
Next article — Call for moratorium on logging old growth
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