Samson & Delilah

Rather like Athol Fugard's early play, Boesman and Lena , though less obviously indebted to Beckett's Waiting for Godot , Warwick Thornton's accomplished film is about the uneasy but ultimately loving relationship between two outcasts, rejected by their own people but unable to find a place in the dominant culture. They're Aboriginal teenagers living in an impoverished village in the Outback. Samson is an inert substance-sniffer at odds with his siblings, Delilah a pretty girl devoted to her elderly grandmother, a tribal painter, and wrongly blamed for her death. After both are beaten up, Samson steals a community-owned van and heads for the nearest township where for a while they sleep under a roadway, cold-shouldered by the local whites and fed by a kindly but demented Aboriginal hobo. There's no formal exposition and virtually no dialogue: Samson's speaks only once, stammering his own name, his mind confused by inhaling petrol fumes. But there's an abundance of social and behavioural detail that we're left to interpret, and there's a tentatively affirmative ending. The performances Thornton has elicited from Rowan McNamara and Marissa Gibson carry total conviction.