‘The New Boy’ Review: Cate Blanchett In Warwick Thornton’s Version Of Australia’s Founding Story – Cannes Film Festival
deadline.comWarwick Thornton is a master maker of images. The first frames of The New Boy – a sweep of dusty ground; a flash of a small boy on a policeman’s back, strangling him; a pre-war telegraph pole, all drenched in the searing white midday light of the desert – create a collage of inland Australia, a world of open spaces.
The boy is duly pulled off of the policeman, put in a sack and delivered in the dark to a mission; a nun opens the door to receive the delivery.
At that point, the gallery of Thornton’s frame becomes a series of golden brown interiors that could have come from Rembrandt, except that they are peopled with Indigenous boys – Lost Boys, as Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett) describes them to God – and the trio of adults who look after them.
Out in the world, their compatriots are embroiled in the Second World War. Here in the mission for Lost Boys, life has its own logic, rhythms and a kind of purity.
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