Agreed. I too am appalled by how many so called works of art attempt to pack days, week, months, years, bloody eons into 150 minutes or 300 -600 pages.

I blame Ari and his bloody Poetics m’self. Imagine how much more yielding of their truths say 2001, The Once and Future King or In Search Of Lost Time would have been if they were delivered in real narrative one to one time.

Obviously, I’ll have to agree to disagree with the Cannes Film Festival as well!

I have to disagree with a few of the points that I saw made elsehwere on this thread:

‘Not didactic’ – it is. When Samson and Delilah wind up in Alice Springs, they find themselves confronted with a range of obvious ‘problems’: Delilah gets snubbed by a shop assistant and an art dealer and a bunch of folks in a cafe (class discrimination, check). She gets raped and assaulted (high levels of crime!) They live under a bridge (problems with housing!) And all of this in the space of a couple of days? We’re supposed to conclude, from that (symbolic! significant!) shot towards the end of the film of the petrol being poured on the ground that Samson is leaving his petrol sniffing behind (learning!) but, really, why should we take that for granted.

‘Authentic’ – Come on. Bunch of characters living in the desert decide to go for a trip to the town? And then go back to the bush and get married? That’s the very definition of generic. And unbelievable, too, because there’s no real emotional connection between the two main characters at all – they end up living together not because this is ‘what really happens’, but because it’s a neat way to tie up plot points.

Warwick Thornton may or may not be a great director, but this certainly isn’t a great film.

Maybe it’s the film that Thornton had to make before he made a great film.

Denningesque, I don’t share your estimation of DS’s reviews, but I agree with his disdain for most hand-held camera, which is often over-used. I call it designer-shake, others call it wobble-cam. It usually takes me out of the film and I often have to look away from the screen. Mind you, much of Samson and Delilah uses hand-held camera (and Thornton did the photography himself, BTW), but uses it very well.

Nicholas, I also loved Beneath Clouds, an excellent companion piece to Samson and Delilah.

You read too quickly (a sin I’m often guilty of in this environment). I’ve never seen Unfinished Sky. The film I loved was Beneath Clouds.

It’s hardly surprising, given the context (!) that I think we both know that words are letting us down here.

Yes of course it’s not just the story or just the words. And part of this reflects my own cognitive and artistic biases and limitations. There’s no doubt that the things you mention are important, and for the reasons you mention.

I still do get tired of reviews of plays spending even as much as a paragraph on the set design and lighting. It’s not that they’re unimportant, and sometimes they’re worth mentioning – I would expect usually in passing – but there’s a kind of trade interest in these things that I think is an occupational hazard of film and theatre reviews being written by film and theatre buffs.

Paul is a film buff and so he thinks about these things as he sees a movie. No crime in that. But I do think the story – interpreted broadly – is the kind of heart of a film. The ‘story’ in S&D isn’t really the ‘plot’ there is no ‘plot’ inteh Star Wars sense, there are series of episodes that amount to something of a ‘story’ and convey a vision – some presentation of the lives of other people. This ‘story’ or ‘vision’ is the thing the film has to say (again, not interpreted didactically – I’m pretty uninterested in any overtly ‘political’ as in party political, policy political interpretations of the film and I think one of its strengths is that it does nothing to invite them.)

Take the film Casablanca. Perhaps not a good example because it’s plot driven, but stick with me here. The sets, the lighting etc. etc. are just things that can be stuffed up. If you get the story or the acting wrong, you will have offended the basic integrity of the piece. I think Ronald Reagan at one stage was considered for Casablanca. In which case it would have been a completely forgettable, well scripted movie.

I’d even say that of something like Lawrence of Arabia. It’s self consciously beautiful, but that adds to the film. If it was badly scripted and acted, and had beautiful scenery then it wouldn’t be remembered for much.

So while they’re all important to a film I actually do think that all the professional and creative accoutrements of films and theatre productions are given more attention than they should have – and I’ve tried to say why – but it’s a free world. And this is just someone who’s passionate about some films he’s seen, not a film buff talking.

Anyway, I hope people can at least follow what I’m trying to get at here, even if they continue to disagree.

Films aren’t just narrative content. And in some more goes unsaid than is stated. Certainly in this case, devices like the perspective manipulation mentioned by Paul let you know at least as much about what’s going on ‘inside’ the characters as would a wordier script, because they put you there, and ‘being there’ has a lot to do with how life feels. Not everything that goes on inside is words or rumination. Sometimes these are not even the most important things going on.

Sometimes a movie just knocks my socks off. It’s very rarely the story as such that does this, but rather the world conjured out of moving images, sound, and someone’s ability to put those together to make something unique to the medium.

Surely you jest.

In any event, I find him insufferably patronising. Now if anyone in the whole world deserves to be patronised it’s Margaret, but he’s just patronising as hell, oozes patronage from every pore – towards Margaret and so towards us all.

But it’s a visceral thing. If we had a video in front of us of any episode I think I could point it out, but who knows, you might not agree with me.

I also suspect and now I’ve forgotten the evidence on which I based this finding, ie the film that I thought he completely didn’t ‘get’, that he’s not very bright. This is not great crime. None of us are very bright in so many ways. But when it is combined with his oleaginous self-satisfaction, his conceit about his own insightfulness.

And those are his good points.

(OK the last line is hyperbole!)

Having just read your review, I agree with virtually all of it. And (to me anyway) it also makes or vindicates the points I’ve made above.

Thanks for your thoughtful comments. It certainly isn’t guilt. I would go further on the question of didacticism. I don’t think the film “skillfully avoided didactism”. To the contrary didacticism never seemed to come into the film creators heads – for which I wholeheartedly salute them. I didn’t feel any guilt whatever and don’t really feel guilt – though of course it’s a terrible situation.

I find your own comments a tad effete too. Now I expect I’m being unfair here, because if you are trying to convey what you like about a film, it’s pretty reasonable to list things like music, cinematography. But to me film – certainly a film like this – is fundamentally a story. And while this story is compelling, in its realism the film imposes such strictures on its capacity to really tell the story – to really show us what is inside the heads of the characters – that it is severely limited in its story telling. It depicts people who have pretty much given up speaking to each other. So we don’t really learn much about the contours of the interior story. What’s going on inside Delilah’s head? Is she where she is out of habit, out of taking the least line of resistance, out of love, if so what does she love about Samson? We don’t know.

Now there’s nothing wrong with people making a film like this. Nothing at all. My own reaction is neither here nor there, except it may be of interest to people on this blog fwiw. My reaction is that it’s hard to make a film that I’d give five stars to if I am not led into the drama of the questions I asked above.

I’ve just been over the review again. I guess what I mean by ‘pussy footing’ is that it seemed to me that she was skating over her own lack of engagement with the film. She kind of approved of it in a formal sense – and didn’t miss the opportunity to refer to some allusion to baptism (I confess I missed it) and acknowledged all the film’s formal achievements. Then she says that she needed to slow her pule (I didn’t) and oddly enough doesn’t mention the most confronting part of the movie – the completely senseless violence. (The bits I did mention in my narrative of the plot. No it’s not Star Wars, but I’m going to count the number of positive reviews of the movie that somehow manage to airbrush out those scenes. For people who lionise gritty realism and all that, it’s amazing how often the airbrush comes out. I admire this film for its lack of that kind of thing – for its reality. But from my great cultural distance, though my sympathies were powerfully engaged (on behalf of the lovely Delilah) I couldn’t really get very absorbed in it for the reasons intimated.