To watch this dreamlike and floatingly indeterminate film, with its eerily composed photographs and murmuringly inaudible near-wordlessness, is to enter a state of bewilderment and discombobulation or maybe of scepticism indefinitely deferred – beginning with that title. Whose kindness? Has it actually survived? As a result of it seems to be very a lot as if, on this scary apocalyptic world, what has survived is the other of kindness.
We discover ourselves in a good looking, however robust and unforgiving panorama of desert and mountain, for which writer-director Rolf de Heer has used the Flinders mountain ranges of South Australia. Some horrible disaster (maybe chemical or organic) has precipitated mass an infection and loss of life amongst white folks, whose survivors need to put on fuel masks, however has not affected folks of color, who’re nonetheless harassed and tyrannised and enslaved by these sinister masked figures. A number of the overclass put on a military-style peaked cap with the fuel masks, reminding me of the well-known picture of the bandaged visitors warden in Mick Jackson’s nuclear horror Threads.
One of many slaves is stored in a tiny cage, outdoors a home during which the gas-mask wearers appear to be having a bizarre occasion; a cake within the form of the native panorama is being minimize, maybe symbolising some callous divvying up of territory. This girl, known as merely BlackWoman within the credit and performed with quiet grace by Mwajemi Hussein, is then towed out in her cage into the desert and left there, surreally and terribly alone. She has no meals or water however, on this stylised and theatricalised film, this isn’t as essential as the concept of imprisonment.
Fairly often there’s something intriguingly summary concerning the photographs De Heer contrives. As together with his earlier film, Ten Canoes from 2006, the film seems to be like one thing Peter Brook might need placed on stage. BlackWoman manages to drive her means out of the cage by snapping off a free little bit of steel and utilizing it to loosen one of many cage panels. (Later, this resourceful character, after being re-enslaved, will use a salvaged little bit of wire to noticed by means of her neck manacle.)
BlackWoman walks about, taking some sneakers from a white man’s corpse however virtually instantly having these taken off her at gunpoint by another person. She helps a paralysed white man who, alongside together with his spouse, is within the closing levels of the sickness, after which finds herself in some type of deserted museum whose mannequins of white authority she merely smiles at, tapping one on the top – and permitting us to understand that the true factor would do one thing lots nastier to her. She takes some clothes and a rifle and heads off, however then provides this (unloaded) rifle to a different terrified determine on the street. BlackWoman’s kindness has survived, in any respect occasions.
Lastly, she daubs her face with white ash and, sporting a fuel masks, is ready to disguise herself as a white particular person, and befriends two South Asian youngsters (performed by Deepthi Sharma and Darsan Sharma) – however winds up being captured once more and put to work in a grim manufacturing facility. The entire unusual odyssey is to come back full circle, asking to us re-examine the sense during which all this has been occurring.
The Survival of Kindness has static parts of an artwork set up, a non-narrative dream state that’s half arresting, half irritating. It generally feels as if its occasions and encounters might be reshuffled and proven in any order, and occasionally it’s spinning its wheels dramatically. But there’s a actual depth to the movie, particularly on the very starting during which BlackWoman’s eyes and arms loom in excessive closeup (a visible mannerism that isn’t utilized in the remainder of the movie). It’s a chic reverie concerning the violence and the stoicism beneath the floor of peculiar life.