Samson and Delilah

‘Samson and Delilah’; a primeval movie made in a primeval land. The movie is billed as a love story, in the same way ‘Sid and Nancy’ was a love story; bleak and raw.

What is there to do in Warlpiri? Wake up sniff petrol, eat, go to bed – this is Samson’s life, day after day after day after relentless day. The only sunshine in his life is his attraction to Delilah, a girl who lives with, and cares for, her grandmother; a grandmother who paints the dot pictures for the ‘white fella’ to sell to the tourists and art dealers of the big city for thousands of dollars but returns to the artist less than a token, just enough to keep them in paint a little amount of food. As the one telephone in that is in community is left to ring unanswered, how does Samson express his growing feelings for Delilah? The only ways he knows how; by throwing rocks at her, or drawing ‘S4D’ in permanent marker on the wall of the only store, or by moving in, unasked, with her and her nanna.

When nanna dies both Samson and Delilah are cast out, they steal a car and head to the big city only to discover that the isolation they are fleeing is magnified by the loneliness of living in the white man’s world. Through all this the one thing that holds them together is their unspoken love. As Samson slides further into his petrol induced haze, Delilah endures the violence, starvation and addiction that are heaped upon her with a quiet dignity that defies her age.

The strength of this film lies not only in the ability of Director/Writer, Warwick Thornton, to convey in image rather than word the bleakness of this world but also in the talent of his two lead actors, Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson to effectively portray that image for us in a way that doesn’t just alienate us but allows us to still feel empathy for them. At no stage does Thornton allow the film to wallow in cheap sentimentality.

This film could not be made by anyone other than an Aboriginal film maker. No Aboriginal community could open up and allow their story to be told by anyone else, possibly because they have been used and misrepresented more often than not by well meaning white men looking to do the ‘right thing.’ Hopefully enough people will see ‘Samson and Delilah’ to dispel the image of the ‘noble savage’ as portrayed in Baz Luhrmann’s, ‘Australia.’

The disturbing thing for me as I watched the film, I realised; I was to a large extent untouched by it. This is not to say I wasn’t moved because I was, deeply; but the world that Samson and Delilah inhabit is as far away from my reality as mine is from theirs and I couldn’t integrate that world with my own, and I guess that really is the point – I can’t for one minute believe that this world exists, yet it does. To live in the outback in a ‘black fella’ community, as presented in this film, is a life sentence without possibility of parole.

In ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ I was horrified by the filth and the abject poverty but this is my own country, how can we allow this to continue? But we do … but I do. It’s easier for me because I rationalise it; it happens out there, in the Outback, yet if I went two suburbs over from my safe haven in Darlinghurst I would be in Everleigh St., Redfern a suburb where the lives of the Warlpiri are alive and not so well.

We pride ourselves by saying how far we have come as a country, our Prime Minister has said ‘Sorry’, but in reality what has actually changed for Australia’s Aboriginals – nothing. The white man is still making good capital from the black man’s plight, both politically and financially.