Outback film enchants and challenges

It is hard to think of two more dissimilar places than the French Riviera and Australia's Red Centre, but the two have this week come together with the film, Samson and Delilah, getting a much-deserved showing at the Cannes Film Festival.

Set in a hardscrabble indigenous community in the sun-parched outback of the Northern Territory, it charts the blossoming, though wordless, romance between two teenagers, Samson and Delilah, played by unknown local actors, Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson.

Samson is a drifter and a petrol sniffer. Delilah spends her days looking after her grandmother, and assisting with her art. When her grandmother dies, the community blames Delilah, and she escapes with Samson to Alice Springs.

Samson and Delilah, which was written, shot and directed by the indigenous film-maker Warwick Thornton, has been described as one of the finest films ever to have come from Australia. I saw it last week and found it as enchanting as it is confronting.

Snapshots of Australia's multiplex national persona have long been found in the reels of film that comprise its cinematic canon, and this is an extraordinary and much-needed addition.

Margaret and David of ABC's popular At the Movies, Australia's foremost film reviewers, have both given it five stars - the first Australian movie to receive a maximum 10 out of 10 score (Brokeback Mountain, Good Night, Good Luck, and No Country for Old Men are the only other films with have got two five stars in the show's 23-year history).

"This is for me one of the most wonderful films this country has ever produced," said Margaret Pomeranz.

Others have likened it to New Zealand's Once Were Warriors, another extraordinary film, for its depiction of everyday life in indigenous communities. So it is a great shame that it is not on general release. Last week, it was being shown in just four Sydney cinemas.

"Indigenous affairs" is Australia's great fly-over problem. Most of us tend to view Aboriginal communities from the vantage point of 30,000ft as we jet off to Perth, Asia or Europe. This film brings a close-up depiction of many of the problems commonly found in Outback communities, and it is very unsettling.

The film cost $A1.6m (£800,000), a small fraction of the $A197m lavished on Baz Luhrmann's Australia. But this is a far superior film. I enjoyed Australia, but Luhrmann used imported American idioms, opted for hackneyed doggerel in much of its dialogue and chose a self-important title (which was not a particularly clever idea in a country where people bridle at fellow compatriots who get a little above themselves). Opting for his trademark heightened artifice, he also played with the history and the landscape.

Samson and Delilah, by contrast, is authentic and, in parts, dialogue-free.

This truly is Australia.

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