#TheNewBoy a new film by #WarwickThornton (2023)
saw this was a reasonable price thru itunes - it’s always instructive to read imdb reviews first - esp the negative ones. someone was unhappy that nothing happened in this movie. 🙄
i’m reminded by the neg review of the story of kirk douglas’ plan to write an australian movie in which he would be a cowboy hero (the story resurrected by the Daily Mail UK a while ago - be warned if you search for it, the whole thing is a report about a cluelessly racist idea)
it seems rather pointless to me to watch a film from an Indigenous film-maker and expect it to have an exclusively western worldview, or to fit a hollywood scriptwriting template
this is shot in outback South Australia (near Burra), in a location where the silence would be deafening except there would be sounds of a world without modern white-noise. And the story is set in a time (mid 1940s) when there was even less happening.
so it’s quiet.
the main character - the new boy - is 9 years old and does not speak for quite some time when he is first taken to a monastery (under Aboriginal “Protection” laws). The first few minutes of film set the tone - it’s mostly quiet and there is very little happening (apart from what IS happening).
this is a story of the collision of two cultures, told from a very personal, individual point of view. i guess some people might make a lot of noise when strange things are happening, but the rest of us might be quiet, like the new boy. I know I would.
do we absolutely have to understand every single thing that’s happening or can we, like the new boy, just see that strange things are happening without anybody telling us what it all means? if so, then perhaps you might prefer a traditional western or something.
Cate Blanchett goes all out as an unhappy nun (is that a redundancy?), Wayne Blair plays George, and Deborah Mailman plays Sister Mum. (And no, this is not about an Irish laundry, but i suddenly can’t help thinking colonial assimilation works the same way as the Irish Laundry system.)
anyway… slow, but an absolute treat.
https://youtu.be/sL1HVstmBTU?
Deadline
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