The Survival of Kindness (Rolf de Heer, 2022) aka The Mountain (working title); prod. Julie Byrne, dp Maxx Corkindale; Mwajemi Hussein, Darsan Sharma, Deepthi Sharma, Gary Waddell; BlackWoman is abandoned in a cage in the middle of the desert; she escapes and walks from desert to mountain to city; premiere at Adelaide FF 23Oct22, Berlinale23
Until this one, Rolf de Heer hadn't made a film for nine years.
It took me a while to stop seeing this film as realistic. BlackWoman is locked in a cage for at least two days and nights before she (implausibly) frees herself by fashioning a screwdriver out of a piece of metal from the cage and undoes one screw. But she does not look for drink or food. She is only seen only to take two sips of water, and that is days later, and I don't remember her ever eating. And let's not mention any other natural functions: the film doesn't.
No, it's a parable, or an allegory, and makes as much sense as Pilgrim's Progress, which it rather resembles – except in the denouement.
In cinematic terms, it's a road movie, on foot. Except that in this one, the protagonist is on no quest, and gets nowhere. In fact (spoilers), she returns to where she started – making the title a double misrepresentation: there is (almost) no kindness; and neither will she survive.
As in Bunyan's educational tale, the hero(ine) meets various characters. That they are ciphers is partly indicated by their names in the cast list: WailingWoman, SickMan, BrownGirl, GraveDigger, and so on—all signs of what is wrong with the film's world, the City of Destruction. But there is no Celestial City for this pilgrim. (big spoiler) Very unusually, and I suppose this is what de Heer hoped would set his story apart from all others: the pilgrim returns to the exact same Destruction to which she was condemned at the outset.
There is a "kindness" moment two-thirds of the way through. It lasts less than a minute.
... Here are some clips from what other people have to say about it.
Luke Buckmaster:
A surreal stillness permeates the air of Rolf de Heer’s new film, based in a dystopian world obviously intended as an allegorical statement about our own. Oppression and colonisation emerge as key themes in an almost dialogue-free experience that follows a protagonist, billed in the credits only as BlackWoman (Mwajemi Hussein), who guides the audience through hauntingly beautiful landscapes dotted with treacherous scenarios and beleaguered people. But beware any interpretation that prescribes precise meaning, because The Survival of Kindness is a tantalisingly elusive picture – the most enigmatic work yet from the veteran genre-flipping auteur. The Guardian.
Peter Bradshaw:
The Survival of Kindness has static elements of an art installation, a non-narrative dream state that is part arresting, part frustrating. It sometimes feels as if its events and encounters could be reshuffled and shown in any order, and on occasion it is spinning its wheels dramatically. Yet there is a real intensity to the film, especially at the very beginning in which BlackWoman’s eyes and hands loom in extreme closeup (a visual mannerism that is not used in the rest of the film). It is an elegant reverie about the violence and the stoicism beneath the surface of ordinary life. The Guardian.
Pat Brown:
It hardly needs to be said that the true subject here isn’t Australian society “after” a future collapse. Rather, this is a story about collapses that have already happened, the recurring apocalypses that modernity has wrought on Indigenous people. It’s our world from an estranged perspective—one that suggests that, amid all the madness, it can feel like something out of a dream when some smidgen of kindness has survived. Slant.
as above
Garry Gillard | New: 4 January, 2022 | Now: 19 December, 2023