Throughout Rolf de Heer’s exceptional body of work, he’s excelled at making his characters representative of a group of oppressed peoples while miraculously imbuing them with a sense of individual humanity. In recent films like Ten Canoes and Charlie’s Country, he’s surpassed the often straightjacketing concept of simple representation to celebrate the spirit of each person, ensuring they’re not lost in the well-meaning vacuum of generalizations. The Survival of Kindness is a continuation of these themes, beginning with the shocking image of a black woman in a cage, yet as it follows this resourceful woman through a dark journey in which plague and racism play determining roles, it feels like the concept has overwhelmed the narrative, so that the film’s initial power is weakened by an amorphous obviousness.
That doesn’t detract from the film’s visual beauty nor the compelling lead, credited simply as BlackWoman (Mwajemi Hussein), whose trek on foot through desert, mountains and forest is a journey towards survival as long as hope lasts. In this dystopian world however, hope gathers in little pools like quicksilver and then scurries away, laying bare a landscape so deprived of the milk of human kindness that the only sure place is within oneself. But is this really the message? And if so, why this title? It’s more probable that this eminently humane director hasn’t quite found the means to process the COVID years – this is very much a pandemic-era film – and the ways it reinforced separation and otherness. While The Survival of Kindness will play the art house circuit, it’s unlikely to be celebrated in the same way as his past few features.
Before the deeply disturbing sight of BlackWoman in a cage, we see plastic figurines of black slaves and white overseers, a kind of Uncle Tom’s Cabin diorama, that turns out to be decorating a cake eagerly shared among a group of white people in gas masks whose language is unintelligible – only at the very end do we hear anyone speak in identifiable words (no subtitles are provided). As guests leave the house, some guys in a truck drive out with that cage hitched behind; when day comes, they unhook the cage and leave BlackWoman in the middle of the desert.
Following a few broiling days, icy nights and large ants that attack each other in clusters, she notices a loose bar that she pries off and files down into a screwdriver: freedom. As she walks through the parched landscape she takes the clothes off a dead man, and in a cluster of rundown shacks meets an interracial couple whose large facial lesions leave no doubt about their fate. This is a world suffering under the double plagues of racism and a pandemic, so not unlike our own, though this one has echoes of Planet of the Apes (even if the racial politics are of course rather different).
Much of the film sees BlackWoman walking – at one point incongruously climbing – through different landscapes, exchanging shoes whenever possible with people no longer needing theirs. As the environment shifts from desert to inhabited spaces, she hides from the whites she sees in gas masks and doesn’t communicate with the blacks she sees in cages: pragmatism is the only way to survive. She manages to get a mask of her own, crudely whitening up the area around her eyes to disguise her black skin and “pass,” but she’s caught and then rescued by two teenagers, BrownGirl (Deepthi Sharma) and BrownBoy (Darsan Sharma). They’re the first true human contact she’s had, despite not being able to communicate through language, but this idyll won’t last.
While with the teens, she points to a toy flag and gestures with her fingers, implying she’s trying to get to that country where presumably she’ll finally feel safe. It’s the first time we’ve had a sense of what she’s aiming for, apart from survival, and the script’s deliberate minimalism doesn’t enlighten us further, which is something of a problem given the choice she ultimately makes. De Heer’s evocation of a harsh world whose beauty has been corrupted by inhumanity is perhaps more pronounced in this film than usual, yet there’s something so cut and dry, even obvious, about the racial brutality that it loses its ability to shock soon after the first scene of BlackWoman in a cage. Perhaps part of the problem is that we expect more from this director, something deeper and more poignant, but could it also be that the title is meant to be ironic? Has kindness, certainly endangered, not survived?
Also unclear is the way de Heer uses the pandemic, no longer metaphorical in this COVID age. Yes it separates us further from each other, dividing the sick from the healthy which is then reinforced by the dehumanizing gas masks: fear exacerbates our distrust of the other, and we’ve seen firsthand how nations in the Global South as well as minority communities in the Global North were marginalized from access to vaccinations and treatment. The Survival of Kindness doesn’t develop these ideas or work them in to the script in any way that furthers our understanding: it’s true de Heer is far too subtle a writer-director for easily sign-posted moments of outrage, and he’s successfully created a disturbing, post-apocalyptic atmosphere not so far removed from our own, yet the film’s hazy take on community versus self-reliance is difficult to interpret.
The exigencies of shooting during the pandemic required de Heer to work in new ways, with a younger, stripped-down crew, but thematically and visually the film is intimately linked to his earlier works. Mwajemi Hussein, a social worker originally from the DRC whose life story as a displaced person dovetails in some ways with BlackWoman, has a presence that naturally recalls the director’s late muse David Gulpilil, combining gravitas with a quiet ironic awareness. This is cinematographer Maxx Corkindale’s first fiction feature (he worked with Molly Reynolds on My Name is Gulpilil), and his sensitivity to the shifting qualities of light in the various landscapes creates beautiful images without overshadowing the actor’s vital presence.
Director: Rolf de Heer
Screenplay: Rolf de Heer
Cast: Mwajemi Hussein, Deepthi Sharma, Darsan Sharma
Producers: Julie Byrne, Rolf de Heer
Co-producer: Ari Harrison
Executive producers: Sue Murray, Bryce Menzies, Domenico Procacci, Molly Reynolds
Cinematography: Maxx Corkindale
Production designer: Maya Coombs
Costume designer: Elle Baldock
Editing: Isaac Coen Lindsay
Music: Anna Liebzeit
Sound: Adam Dixon-Galea, Tom Heuzenroeder
Production companies: Triptych Pictures (Australia), Vertigo Productions (Australia)
World sales: Fandango
Venue: Berlinale – competition
96 minutes
