MUBI

Nic Roeg’s first solo effort as director. An English teenager (Jenny Agutter) and her much younger brother (played by Roeg’s son, simply billed as Lucien John) become suddenly stranded in the middle of the Australian outback where they eventually encounter an Aboriginal youth on walkabout (David Gulpilil). I won’t spoil the movie by saying any more except that it features beautiful landscapes and wildlife thanks to Roeg’s typically excellent cinematography, great performances from the three leads, enough ambiguity to make the film very re-watchable and full frontal nudity from a 16-year-old Jenny Agutter. Oh yeah, and real animals are killed. You have been warned.

Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout tells the story of two children, one a teenage schoolgirl (Jenny Agutter) and the other her little brother (Luc Roeg), who are put into a deeply disturbing and unexpected situation that changes both of their lives forever. They are part of an middle class nuclear family in Australia. One day they are picked up from school by their father who then proceeds to drive into the desert, presumably for a picnic as they have a sheet and food with them. Eventually the father stops the car and the children get out. The girl helps set up the food and the sheet for the picnic while the boy plays around with his toys. Suddenly, for no seemingly no reason at all, their father pulls out a gun and begins shooting at his two children before getting out of the car, setting it on fire, and then shooting himself in the head. The boy hides behind a large rock, but the girl witnesses the entire thing. She is scared and shocked, but in order to hide the horror of the situation from her brother she quickly tells him that their father said to go on ahead without them. So they walk in the opposite direction. They walk for a few days, slowly eating their food and water along the way until they run out. They begin to get really hungry and thirsty to the point where they can barely move at which point an aborigine boy finds them. The girl is unable to communicate with him, but the boy’s simplistic gestures are understandable enough for the aborigine to understand. He helps them survive through hunting and living off the land and the three youngsters grow very close, despite the complete and utter lack of communication. It turns out that the aborigine is enduring a “walkabout”, which, roughly according to the opening scroll of the film, is a rite of passage where an aborigine, who is not quite a man yet no longer a boy, must live in the wilderness for six months.

Walkabout is impossible to forget. The film’s imagery is ultimately very personal and so intimate and close in it’s depiction of events that it is harrowing to watch. The opening scenes of the situation taking place that leaves the two main characters alone in the desert seems very cruel, even for a horror film. The atmosphere comes across as almost too realistic at times, which only helps elevate the tension of the picture. So yes, this is a very scary and disturbing film. However, once you get past that the film is also one of the most powerful, emotional, and challenging films all at once about the outback and about children and about society. The environment of the film may change, but we are left with the same feeling of dread and of intensity regardless of where the characters are. The scenes that take place in homes and in the city and basically everywhere else except the desert are just as intense and abrasive as the scenes in the desert. The juxtapositions that Roeg makes play a part, not only in the atmosphere of the film but also in the film’s philosophy of nature vs man. We see flies buzzing around but the film quickly cuts to the boy’s buzzing sounds as he plays with his airplane before taking out a squirt gun and going bang bang bang and putting it up to his mouth and shooting water into his throat, with the gun positioning looking like a suicidal attempt. Then of course we see the father shooting at his son and his daughter before shooting himself in the same way that the boy was shooting himself. It’s disturbingly ironic sounding, I know, but the film is full of these sorts of images and comparison shots. There’s a scene where the aborigine kills a wallaby before chopping it into pieces with his crude blade while the camera cuts to a man in a butcher shop cutting meat. Both animals are dead and both people are, to one degree or another, cutting the animal for the same reason. Survival. The only difference is in the setting and in the clothes. The symbolism in this film is constant and very memorable, and yet none of it proves distracting to the plot or the emotions. A viewer can choose to ignore the symbolism and just enjoy the story about these children getting lost and befriending an aborigine. The film would still be perfect if it had been left as just that, but instead Nicholas Roeg goes an extra mile and includes so many wonderful themes and images that only strengthens the realism of the film itself. It’s a spectacular idea, and the film works wonderfully.

Jenny Agutter performed in this film before she was ever in her most well known films such as Logan’s Run, Equus, An American Werewolf in London, and Child’s Play 2, but honestly I think her work here is the best she has ever done. She was only about nineteen or twenty when she acted in this film, and she really was born to play this role. Her presence comes off incredibly strong. She and Luc Roeg have to carry an entire film and both do tremendously. This has been the only film that Nicholas Roeg’s son Luc Roeg has appeared in, but he has a lot of charisma which definitely helps make his scenes with the aborigine that more alive and genuine. Their chemistry is simply a sight to behold. The aborigine himself, David Gulpilil, is just as fantastic as everyone else here. His smile is contagious and he does a fantastic job in a role that requires pure emotion and bodily skill and no understandable dialogue. In fact, it’s perhaps the best I have ever seen. What I find even more incredible about these performances is just the minimalism of it all. The dialogue, to my understanding, was mostly improvised. The film’s naturalness flows beautifully, and these performances help lend themselves to the reality so that when the picture turns dark and scary we as the audience feels that. The film contains little dialogue. The actions speak all for themselves, and what I appreciated more about this artistic excursion is that the visuals as well as the sound both work in telling the story.

There are scenes of actual animal killing in this film and the scenes are very bloody. These scenes are presented in two different ways. First, they are presented as part of the survival tactics of the aborigine. Second, they are portrayed in a gratuitous manner and for no reason. Both ways justify themselves. The first way only adds to the symbolism the film depicts and is representative of the element of survival. People who have to survive in the desert sometime need to kill animals in order to eat. The meat eating these characters do are presented in the same way as when they eat fruit. The act of eating always involves the taking of a life or lives, whether it be animal or plant. The film gets that. There’s a scene where the boy eats some kind of fruit that birds are feasting upon in a tree and says that it tastes like meat. It isn’t how he says it though, it’s the way he says it. He says the fruit tastes like meat in a rather unflinching and thankless way. He personally doesn’t care what the food tastes like just so long as he isn’t starving. As for later on in the film where the animals are killed for no reason, we as the audience suddenly act as witness to the slaughtering. We do not like it. It is presented as cold and cruel as it always has been. It also plays a key role in the plot and the fate of the aborigine that helps lend itself to the emotion of the film and the plot in question. It’s not pleasant to look at and we don’t like it, and thus we understand the emotions of the characters on a much more personal level.

The theme of human sexuality is presented in a rather interesting way in this film. The camera depicts man closer shots of Jenny Agutter’s body, nude and otherwise, which on the surface seem rather uncomfortable in a sense that she’s playing a fifteen year old girl. However, think of the characters in this film. The three main ones are children, and one of them is roughly the same age as the girl. It grows a little more obvious that the chemistry between the aborigine boy and the fifteen year old girl is more than just mutual. They peer at each other’s crotches and the camera represents the mind of the characters that grow more interested in each other. It’s not exploitative exactly, but it’s a very brave perspective for the film to take. What the film is partly trying to say is that everyone, be it child or adult, is inherently sexual. It is little more than a curiosity for most children, but for the children who have become teenagers it means a lot more. This also plays into the plot as the part of the film that most audiences seem the most confused by, which is the part of the film where the girl denies the aborigine boy’s sexual advances. It has more to do with fear on both of the characters parts. It does result in a rather sad conclusion that may also be shocking for a lot of people, but it is entirely necessary for the film’s ending to come off more effectively.

The film was made with little to no real technical skill and was apparently mostly improvised. The aborigine people were apparently actual aborigines and the settings were all on location. The crew for this film had little to work with despite the budget, and yet they were all able to craft a film that is as epic and as large in scope as any old Hollywood blockbuster. This film works brilliantly, both as an independent film and as a film in itself. The film is a joy to just watch. You could turn the sound off and just watch what is going on and you’d understand it. However, you’d miss the sound that is a joy to the ears. The music in this film is incredibly chilling and haunting, but it’s so beautiful and almost nostalgic sounding in the sense that it’s almost comforting in a weird way. Nicholas Roeg takes the time to develop the characters and the setting so that the symbolism works more powerfully, but the audience doesn’t have to look into the symbolism to enjoy the film.

There is another Australian film that works in a similar way called Picnic at Hanging Rock which I will review another time. Walkabout, however, is one of the greatest films of all time. It is horrifying, disturbing, emotional, beautiful, honest, entertaining, and ultimately just majestic. It is surreal and it is unusual, but it is also mesmerizing and moving. Walkabout works as a coming-of-age film, a psychological thriller, a documentary, a tragedy, and it’s even an excellent children’s film. Whether or not you have interest in the subject matter is irrelevant. Seriously, this film is so damn good. I love this film. This is my favorite Nicholas Roeg film along with The Man Who Fell to Earth. Walkabout is a masterpiece and there will never be another film like it.

A wit of this film starts with the introduction. Through a presentation in the text we see what’s Walkabout. Then we see images of a father who is close to madness and decides to kill his two sons. The part where it is shown to us is somewhat incomprehensible, because it does not show an objective justification for what happened. But the importance of the movie does not understand why the father of the two main characters became a madman. First of all this movie is a mix of cultures and ways of survival and this is what is important to realize. In this world multi-cultural human diversity is fascinating: not only because it is a reason that man is always looking for new, but also to realize how the man is a complex and socially different only in the middle where you live. However, the way humans communicate not need to be extremely accurate. In a sequence is shown in a great moment of cinematic language, like the man in the most primitive forms of communication can communicate more efficiently than the more evolved language: after several reminders sister with a water meant that Aboriginal English extremely correct, the child comes and tells the Aboriginal sign language, which quickly understood than they wanted to.
But the clash of cultures the expression of feeling most primitive of human reason is the birth of a need to express. But in this case the communication is made by a noise of symbolism and semantics. Then the miscommunication will cause harm to someone and not good: the Aboriginal falls for girl. Decided, begins to show him that affection through a ritual peculiar to their culture. But after many hours “dance” his message was not understood, which causes it to commit suicide.

Although at a glance this film seems to be about civilization and the natural world (from which the civilized beings are estranged, somehow contributing to their dysfunctional state as in the father who loses his mind and starts shooting at his young son at the picnic scene), the outback seems to be also associated with unrestrained sexuality (e.g. the couple in an outdoor geology expedition). The English woman sitting on her bed at a pottery farm also suggests that something is not quite right. It seems to be about culture shock (different customs, values and communication breakdown), displaced culture (the English in Australia) at odds with the new environment and the difficulty of attaining happiness under such circumstances. The symbolism of tree as a tree of life (e.g. at the oasis) is contrasted with that of tree of death in two deaths, that of the father and the aborigine boy. Personally, I find the conclusions of the film not very satisfying or convincing, although the nostalgia and regret for the Paradise Lost does come through with the recitation of the poem A Shropshire Lad (Poem 40):

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

“Walkabout” is an often disorienting experience that offers the audience a bare amount of exposition. There is a violent unsettling act early in the story of wilderness survival that sets the story in motion, but is never explained. The question of why is important, but not knowing the answer is just as necessary and in not providing an answer director Nicolas Roeg is stretching our brain muscles and
removing the safety netting. We start the movie disoriented, lost and this is a deliberate choice by its creator. “Walkabout” is a dangerous movie about seemingly irrational acts of violence and the violent and rational cycle of life played out in nature. It’s also about man’s uneasy relationship with the frequently violent natural world and how this relationship defines us.

Nicolas Roeg is a master craftsman who in this film is more comfortableconveying meaning through montage than filmed conversation. "Walkabout"opens with a dialogue-free tour of modern-day (circa 1960s) industrial Australia. Machines click clack, cars honk, and butchers slice withcold mechanical precision. Even the film’s lead (played by JennyAgutter and referred to as Girl in the credits) is trapped in a mechanical role as she and her classmates steadily drone and sputter in a classroom voice exercise. The modern world is cold, angular, gray, impersonal. Contrast the cold grays of urban Australia with the brilliant rust-colored sands of the film’s wild outback setting. These are two vastly different worlds and successfully moving from one to another proves impossible for everyone in the movie.

The film’s simple story finds actress Jenny Agutter and the director’s young son Luc Roeg abandoned in the Australian outback and details their attempt to survive. During their journey they meet a helpful Aboriginal teenager on his walkabout, a rite of passage where a young man is left to the wilderness to survive on his own. A nagging question tugs at us throughout the film as we wonder if the Aboriginal teen is irreparably harming his quest as he becomes more involved in the lives of the two city dwellers. As the trio wanders through the wilderness, the children, who arrived in the outback in formal school uniforms, slowly shed their outfits as they begin to adapt to the natural world.

As mentioned, “Walkabout” is a story about violence and Roeg’s film is filled with much violent efficiency as insects strip down carrion, rust reclaims abandoned mining outposts, men slaughter wildlife for sustenance and sport, and the native peoples of the outback pick over a burnt and abandoned automobile. Those who would claim “Walkabout” is a simplistic fable about returning to nature and living simply neglect how unforgiving the outback is in the film. It readily consumes anything that stands still. Life in the wilderness is short and brutal, but Roeg does seem to be saying that the trappings of modern life are noise that distracts us from our finite nature and inevitability that the land will one day reclaim us for its own.

The existence of the British interlopers is simplified as they focus on the essential concerns of finding food, water, and shelter. In an existence stripped down to essential needs, a sexual longing quickly develops between the Aboriginal teen and the girl he is shepherding through the wilderness. Roeg’s treatment of this inevitability is frank, insistent, and sure to make many viewers ill at ease although it never seems forced or unnatural. This is a film about being guided by essential needs when removed from the concerns of modern existence. Roeg’s frank examination of sexuality is more anthropological than titillating.

The film is finally beautifully elliptical. “Walkabout” is about cycles—renewal, destruction, repeat. The film is bookended by unsettling deaths the causes of which the movie does not explain, but which can be readily discerned by the attentive viewer. “Walkabout” works on a basic emotional level while viewing it, but then expands in significance after the film is turned off and reflected upon. “Walkabout” may be a hard film to love as it is deliberately disorienting and holds that life is brutal and short. But it is a film that is hard to not to appreciate as one peels back its layers after viewing. Most multiplex bon bons quickly pass from memory once we have stepped outside the theater, but “Walkabout” plants itself firmly in the brain and lives on long after the movie has ended.

A great work of art and essential viewing.