A deglamorized couple-on-the-run story, Warwick Thorntons Samson & Delilah doubles as a portrait of a tiny Australian aboriginal community. When nascent couple Samson (Rowan McNamara) and Delilah (Marissa Gibson) receive simultaneous beatingshe from his brothers in retaliation for his own act of aggression, she from the village elders after her grandmother dies under her watchthey steal a truck and head out for (white) civilization, setting up shop beneath an overpass. Beset by cash problems, they take to petty theft and hawking Delilahs paintings, before circumstances necessitate their eventual return home. If the outside world is portrayed largely as a collection of suspicious security guards, condescending owners of native art galleries, and aggressive kidnappers, then the aboriginal community is seen as only slightly more sustaining. Depicted as something like an eternal dead end, the village emerges as a sharply drawn world of gas sniffing, makeshift reggae bands, and corporal punishment. Against such a backdrop, Samson and Delilahs becomes an unlikely coupling, their love story enacted more through ritualized gesture than words, like the two lobbing pebbles at each other, or Delilah washing away her lovers wounds. The spiritual here is every bit as powerful as the physical.
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