Samson and Delilah

Novice actors take the lead in Samson and Delilah. Photo / Supplied

Rating:

****

Verdict:

Bleak, but funny and beautiful too.

The long, still opening shot of this grim, potent Australian debut feature packs a hell of a punch: to the accompaniment of Charley Pride's Sunshiny Day, a teenager stirs under his grubby blanket, wakes, pulls on his shirt - and takes a long and deep inhalation of petrol fumes.

His name, we will learn, is Samson and he lives in a small and pitifully run-down Aboriginal settlement in the red desert of Central Australia.

Samson (McNamara) spends his spaced-out hours rolling round in an abandoned wheelchair and annoying his brother whose three-piece band plays the same expressionless two-chord reggae riff all day in the shade of a verandah. Meanwhile, Delilah (Marissa Gibson) is busy helping her Nana (played by her real Nana, Mitjili Gibson) to produce dot paintings for a predatory buyer and taking her to appointments at a mobile clinic.

It's hard to describe the bleakness that pervades these lives, and harder still to convey the subtlety and skill with which Thornton, who wrote the virtually wordless script, conveys the faltering sense of hope in what follows: Samson seeks Delilah's attention first by throwing stones at her, and then by scrawling obscure, tiny graffiti ("S4D onley ones") on the wall of the settlement's general store. At last she emerges from the shop one day and lobs a snack in his lap - but the courtship has some distance to run.

There's not just bleakness here: there's whimsy and wicked humour and beauty too - watch for a scene when a dancing Samson doesn't know he's being observed. This is a love story but the lovers have a long way to fall.

In exile from the community after separate shocking incidents, they wind up in Alice Springs, sharing shelter beneath a bridge with Gonzo (Thornton's brother Scott), a charmingly oddball alcoholic whose rendition of Tom Waits' Jesus Gonna Be Here is one of the film's highlights. And there is still more tribulation to come.

Thornton's film is fuelled in equal parts by sorrow and anger but it is no shrill polemic. His two characters exist in a world of their own - no brutal police or patronising welfare officers play convenient villains - and the director trusts his novice actors, and us, enough to tell their story slowly, in long slow takes.

There's a narrative loose end here and there and the abrupt, improbable ending is problematic, perhaps, but this is a finely drawn and deeply engrossing debut.

Peter Calder

Cast:

Rowan McNamara, Marissa Gibson, Mitjili Gibson, Scott Thornton

Director:

Warwick Thornton

Running time:

101 mins

Rating: R16

(contains violence and drug use)

In English and Warlpiri with English subtitles