Reviews

Metaphor and realism enmeshed Night Cries was shown in my university course to discuss the relationship and unresolved issues a lot of people have with their mothers. The mother in Hollywood films and tv series, the homemaker, the shopper, the department store user, the controller, the cleaner, the sexless mother in Leave it to Beaver. All characters distant from the Australian outback and most people's lives. The unresolved and the loss is physical experience. The child now the carer becomes almost her mother for her mother. We don't know whether the white woman adopted her daughter or had a child with an Aboriginal man and this uncertainty leaves the viewer with questions about society, the law, skin groups, and family ties. Isolation becomes the cliche for the outback as well as mother-daughter relations. Expectations isolate a child. Attachments and trust building are isolated through social expectations. Left grieving, is death too late to cry and to question and talk?

All I noticed was the implied sexual predator on the streets preying amongst poverty in Calcutta starkly contrasted with the fluorescent white skin in Tasmania, supposed to represent the "good".

The film constructs a story that we are meant to accept without question: that white people do no harm. I can only imagine the distress in adoption and refugee experience when facing a different face to their mother and people. Facial recognition and emotional connection has been researched in relation to mental health. The disparate skin-knowledge (language, religion, smells, emotional expression are a few we develop through thr socialisation process from birth) and distance in body and land that that young man must have experienced is heartbreaking because he was sent without knowledge of mental wellbeing in young children to a foreign place. Of course the foreignness was meant to be accepted as white and good. Of course we are not wired through the media to see this as questionable and harmful , the white foreignness found a child from poverty. The child like others needs to find a place of belonging and entitled to question this not simply accept the cognitively constructed social that becomes ordinary everyday life in Australia. The stolen generation in Australia knows these feeling well and have not had their emotional expression validated outside of reconciliation policies and paperwork. Adoption exists and cross cultural relationships do exist some with more hope and acknowledgement than others.

Quite clearly my negative reception of this film or bias is towards the actors not the story: the stark purposeful contrast in skin and culture offering me a way to reconsider adoption experience as well as refugee experience in a foreign place that is not always caring and welcoming. That their experience often invalidated and their mental health unknown other than to professionals and the ordinary person expects respect and gratitude without offering warmth through understanding.

I think the casting was purposeful clearly skin difference (also from a Weinstein perspective???) as well as set up my cognitive bias: I have never watched a Kidman film with interest nor purposefully set out to find one. Maybe thats my own cognitive need for different faces and emotional expression when watching a film's story unfold. Other psychology research has begun to investigate the impact of botox on emotional recongition. Perhaps this presents a problem for me: actors overpaid through botox in a Weinstein production?

At the heart of this film is human cruelty and the rarest quality :genuine human love and kindness. An outcast, a mute with only sign language and her social isolation takes a human interest in a mythological creature. Of course science has the creature locked, chained, and without caring, affectionate contact. Both the underwater myth and the mute are isolated through their differences and both express more humanity than the group, or normal crowd. I say normal because the fear that keeps the myth locked up is the fear that most people share when it comes to social contact with people who are different. The talk or language that goes across barriers is silence. The sign language is warmth, from the heart and reveals the human condition that is rare, authentic and quite disturbed. Why her? Why sign language and the lock up myth?