Walkabout (1971)

Before specifically talking about the film, I just have to ponder the following question: Why do all films that take place in the 70s feel so 70s? Considering the fact that this movie was made in 1971, one must conclude that Roeg was a trend-setter. For my personal tastes, he went a little overboard with the freeze frames, jump cutting, radical though hardly subtle politics, and juxtaposition of jarring images. Aboriginal tearing into meat, Australian white butcher cutting meat in a sanitized setting, back to the Aboriginal, back to the butcher, and back again to the Aboriginal. And what's with all the scenes involving decomposing bodies? Yes, savage innocence, evil imperialists, death, nature vs. industrialization, corruption of a purer way of life, we see all these themes, but it would have been preferable to see it without being visually and aurally clubbed over the head like the poor animals in the outback are.

Disregarding that aspect, I quite liked the story of two white children, one very young, the other pubescent (and lingeringly shot), who get stuck in the Outback after their patriarchal and borderline psycho father is blown up. They then struggle to make it in the wild, and come upon an Aboriginal boy who is on a "walkabout", or a rite of passage journey that boys that age traditionally undertake in order to prove their worthiness as a man. This of course, becomes their walkabout, and they too become "wild" and free. Eventually, they make it back to "civilization", the first sign of this being a beautiful shot of the girl (whose name we never know- thus making it even more symbolic), coming into a clearing and gliding her hand over a man-made fence while walking backwards. What could be more symbolic of the Western values of property and ownership than a fence? She is ecstatic to be near an environment she holds dear, but her younger and more adaptable brother is less so, and the Aboriginal boy is even less so, which leads to tragic consequences.

The movie feels dated, not only in terms of camera-work but also thematically. It's no longer the job of white people to romanticize "savage" peoples, but rather to allow peoples to define themselves. Perhaps Roeg, in some small way, recognized this, thus choosing to have the Aboriginal boy speak his language and not provide us with subtitles. We could never understand totally, though we can sympathize.

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Fmovies: In the late sixties and early seventies there was an unusual kind of excitement when you went to the movies. It probably had not happened since movies were first invented and has not happened since in commercial theatrical releases. This was the feeling of "I don't know what is going to happen next"! What happened one day was completely unexpected when I first saw the opening of "Walkabout". The introduction gave almost no clue as to what was to come next, but it was visually and aurally fascinating. The rapidity in which the plot shifted gears made you more sympathetic to the plight of our main characters. The sudden appearance of the Aborigine boy in the nick of time and his taking them under his wing. Then surprises of all surprises--our heroine does many nude scenes. Then her final look of yearning at the end suddenly explains it all. All the while Roeg is doing a travelogue of the Australian outback. This movie is pure genius from beginning to end. A must for any movie collection.

I first remember seeing this film as a late teenager in about 1979. Therefore what most vividly stuck in my mind was the lead character played by a beautiful blonde English girl, Jenny Agutter, Specifically the nude scenes of her swimming and washing.

On a less superficial level it is a film with a point-something along the lines of the graciousness of Aborigines and their ability to live in harsh surrounds, and the destructive nature of suburban life in a flat in a major city.

I think it would be a film, like Jedda, that will always be on reference for the Australian Outback, Aboriginals and the modern society which brought a European civilisation to their land.

Walkabout fmovies. A sometimes puzzling, sometimes enigmatic, but always interesting movie, although it is a bit easier to understand if you've read the novel on which it's based. Jenny Agutter is particularly good as the English girl who suddenly finds herself stranded in the desert with her younger brother, and was at just the right age--about 16--to play the part. David Gulpilil as the aborigine youth "gone walkabout" who rescues them is also excellent. The uncomfortable contrasts between European and aboriginal cultures are undeniably accurate, and the use of A. E. Housman's poem, "Into my heart an air that kills" adds additional poignancy to the already bittersweet ending.

A remarkably potent little film about a couple of very proper English kids who get lost in the Australian outback and hitch up with an aborigine boy on his initiation quest (or "walkabout"). My mom took me to see it when I was ten, and I've been haunted by it ever since. With some understated yet disturbing themes of alienation and violence, as well as the first scenes of full nudity I had ever witnessed on screen, I've sometimes wondered whether mom knew what she was getting into when she took me along. According to the trailer in the letterbox edition, Parents' Magazine recommended the film "without reservation" for young and old alike, because it depicts "facts of life." While that may be true, times have changed, and I can't imagine anyone today describing this subtle and unsettling story as "family fare." Incredibly tame, on its face, by today's standards of sensory overload, its essential world-weariness and maturity is no longer a didactic priority in our age of overconfidence. Watching it recently, I was on guard for signs of the myth of the "noble savage"--the hackneyed, simplistic, and generally hypocritical pretension that pre-industrial and non-Western peoples are morally superior to decadent moderns, which is demeaning to both modern and "savage" alike. There are instances of it here--most notably when a couple of rifle-toting, four-wheeling hunters decimate the landscape--but the overall emphasis is on the parallels between aborigine and Western life. Even scenes of the transience and decay of modern civilization are mirrored by the life-and-death cycles of the wilderness. With so many underlying similarities, the real question is why the teenaged English girl cannot embrace, figuratively and literally, the young black man who has saved her life and provided so selflessly for her, even while her younger brother, in all his innocence, has never doubted that they are a family. Is it race? Culture? Or does it reach to more fundamental questions of boy and girl, man and woman, human and human? This film has held up remarkably well over the past 30 years, and is well worth a look.

As far as comments about Roeg's going overboard with his message of "nature/aborigine good, industrialisation/white men bad," this is a simplistic way of reading it. First of all, every director has his or her own style, and Roeg started as a cinematographer--his movies tend to contain long, meditative (or, boring, depending on one's view) visual passages. Roeg floods the screen with cascades of images, by turns repetitive and contrasting, much as a poet uses the sounds and rhythms of words, as well as their semantic content, to create "meaning" in the context of the poem.

To expect Roeg not to dwell on images is to expect Tolstoy not to go off on 20-page rants about how the lack of Napoleon would necessitate another to fill his historical role. One overlooks idiosyncracies in one's friends.

I found the movie much more powerful than I expected. My only disappointment with the Criterion DVD release is with the commentaries. I would love to have heard more about the story, and it would have been nice to have heard from David Gulpilil, whose role as the aborigine was a watershed in Australian cinema, as noted in the IMDb article on his career.