The latter sequence deals with rape as a more directly punitive social tool. It’s rape as a force which displaces the victim from their own body. In the first scene Clare focuses on her surroundings during the assault in a clear depiction of dissociation. Clare, sentenced to serve as a kitchen maid on a regimental base where her husband works as a smith, is raped by Hawkins near the start of the film, then gang-raped by Hawkins and his sergeant, Ruse (Damon Herriman), after her husband embarrasses Hawkins in front of a superior officer. As The Nightingale establishes, rape is commonplace in the Australia of 1825, then a brutally hierarchical colony of the British empire. The movie’s volume of sexual violence has proven difficult for audiences there are four rape scenes in the 142-minute film, and more offscreen. In their quiet, doomed longing for friendship and comfort in one another the film locates an emotional core much more moving than its sometimes awkward discourse on colonialist violence. So much of Kent’s movie is concerned with the depth of human need for connection, communicated in lingering close-ups of its two leads staring at one another. Life is cheap and fragile, genuine friendship as precious as it is impossible to sustain. Burning cottages, settlers murdered in their beds, Aboriginal people ripped from their homes and shot filmed with clarity and stillness, The Nightingale’s world is one of ambient hostility. The blunt, repetitive viciousness of Clare’s experiences are echoed in the wider narrative, which follows the young women, and a young Aboriginal tracker, as they seek vengeance against Hawkins. In her world it’s something to be weathered, not resisted. She becomes inured to the state of affairs through repeated trauma. Over the course of months the British officer serially rapes her. Set in 1825 Australia, the film stars Aisling Franciosi as Clare, a young Irish convict and new mother waiting for her supervisor Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin) to recommend her for release. Where other movies would cut away from acts of violence, the drama maintains relentless focus, particularly in its depictions of rape. The Nightingale, the second film from Australian director Jennifer Kent ( The Babadook), is not an easy watch.
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