Samson and Delilah

Samson and Delilah

By Jonathan Fisher, May 27th, 2009


Recently when the hot political issue of asylum seekers was in the news again, the usual reactions from all sides flared up: from the right side of politics, the cries of 'we shall decide who comes into this country, and under what conditions they arrive'. From the left, pleas for compassion and empathy for people so desperate to leave their own countries for fear of persecution that they have reduced themselves to spending six months in a leaky boat to escape. As the calls of 'we have a boat people problem in this country' grew louder, I shook my head in bafflement that more people don't realise that we've had a boat people problem for much longer than the last twenty or thirty years.

Samson and Delilah shows what damage the first group of boat people did to the first inhabitants of this country. Some of the film's marketing may lead you to believe that this is a love story between two young Aboriginals in a dilapidated commune. If only the movie were that sunny. Warwick Thornton's first feature film is more concerned with analysing the prospects of people born into a society that is almost completely without hope.

Samson and Delilah (Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson respectively) live in an isolated Aboriginal reservation in the middle of the central Australian desert. The reservation is much like we would imagine a real one would be -- filthy, quiet, and maddeningly uneventful. Samson wakes up every morning, sniffs some petrol, and wanders around, occasionally attempting to play his brother's electric guitar before being shooed away. He flirtatiously taunts Delilah, who takes care of her ill elderly Nana, who earns money for food by painting extraordinary art-works that are taken by a white man into town. Occasionally he gives her a twenty dollar note for her effort.

Tragedy strikes, and Samson and Delilah decide to leave the reservation to try their luck in a town nearby. They find that there isn't much luck in or out of the reservation. Reduced to living under a bypass, Samson becomes even more dependent on gas fumes while Delilah tries to make money by painting art works of her own. In one devastating scene, she attempts to sell her paintings to an art dealer, who looks up from his expensive laptop and mutters, 'not interested'. She goes on to solicit her paintings to patrons of a nearby cafe, but hardly anyone even notices her. Thornton does not dwell on these scenes, but their impact is clear -- our society has developed a blind spot when it comes to poverty-stricken Indigenous Australians.

Thornton's directorial style is spare, uncomplicated and almost painfully unflinching. There is very little dialogue between Samson, Delilah or anyone else in the film, but the soundtrack of their surroundings is imperative to the movie's effect. What hope do these two have of a better future? Samson cannot even summon the strength to fend for himself, and when Delilah tries she is brushed aside.

Samson and Delilah won the award for best first feature film at Cannes just a few days ago, a supremely prestigious award and an achievement the Australian film industry should be proud of. Now our nation's shameful situation of ethnic inequality is being prepared to be screened in thousands of cinemas around the world. It may not be palatable subject matter for those of us who prefer to see Australia as 'the lucky country', and while it is not a wholly uplifting experience, Samson and Delilah is a powerful masterpiece.