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The blistering heat of the Australian wilderness is the setting for Roeg's profound and troubling film |
Director: Nicolas Roeg
Cast: Jenny Agutter (White girl), Luc Roeg (Brother), David
Gulpilil (Aboriginal boy), John Mellion (Father)
Some films are hard to read. Others delve gently into ideas
so complex and obscure that they need patient attention to follow. And other
films are so elliptical and enigmatic they almost defy understanding. Walkabout is such a film. What is it
about? You could almost say “everything and nothing”.
The surface story is strikingly simple. A 17-year-old girl
(Jenny Agutter) and her much younger brother (Luc Roeg, the director’s son) are
stranded in the Australian outback after their disturbed father first attempts
to kill them (perhaps?) and then sets their car on fire and shoots himself.
Quickly lost, with no idea how to get back to civilisation, they meet a young
Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) on Walkabout. He saves them and agrees to guide
them back to civilisation (perhaps?). But how far can cultural understanding
go?
The story Roeg is telling underneath this bare-bones plot, though,
is intriguing and troubling. Roeg uses the setting to explore the complex
interrelationship between Western civilisation and the native civilisations it
has displaced in many parts of the world. It’s also about ageing, sexual
awakenings and the barriers (some of which we place ourselves) that prevent
communication. This is all set in Roeg’s stunningly photographed, dreamlike
representation of the Australian outback which is part surreal combination of
cross-cuts and editing, part dark nature documentary.
It’s a haunting film where it’s never clear exactly what is
happening, or what each of the characters is aiming to do ( “I don’t know” is a
common refrain heard in the film). From the start, there is clearly something
wrong with the Father in some way (with dark suggestions that he has too great
an interest in his daughter’s burgeoning sexuality), but why does he turn
partly homicidal (he puts little effort into pursuing his children) and then
suicidal? The film gives no real clue.
This confusion about motives continues through the film.
Does the Aboriginal boy really understand (or intend) the need to deliver the
siblings back to civilisation? At one point he walks up a hill, is talked at by
a white woman from a nearby settlement, then returns giving no indication he has
discovered what they are searching for. Later he does the same after finding a
road. Does he want to help? Or is he unwilling to let go of the spiritual
closeness he can feel between the three of them?
Similarly, Agutter’s character undergoes a spiritual
experience so profound, and yet so unsettling to her carefully conventional
upbringing, she seems unable to process it. In the company of the Aboriginal
boy we see her begin to relax and lose some of her carefully guarded
inhibitions (this culminates in a famous naked swimming scene, which got the
film in plenty of trouble in 2003 when the Age of Consent was raised to 18). But
at the same time, she is never really able to communicate with the Aboriginal
boy.
Her attempts to do so are almost laughably incompetent.
While her younger brother develops a natural rapport using sign language, she
is hopelessly wedded to verbal communication (she doesn’t even think to mime
drinking when asking for water). In the outback, she clings far longer than the
boy does to the accoutrements of civilisation in clothing and their radio. While
she does relax, only at rare moments do we feel her humbled by the land around
her. Their first moments together can be seen in the video.
Only for the briefest of brief moments, in an abandoned hut,
do they meet briefly as equals – a silent moment of eyes meeting and a brief
understanding of shared affection. It is shattered by her complete rejection
shortly afterwards of the Aboriginal boy’s courtship dance – scared and
confused (as much by her own obvious interest earlier), she pointedly ignores
the dance, leaving the boy outside all night. The next day she and her brother
are dressed in their school uniforms, as if nothing has happened.
Roeg’s final nihilistic observations – we may at points come
closer together as a species, but we will only rarely ever be able to overcome
the barriers we have created between ourselves. We may develop an immediate
bond with people in extreme circumstances, but the closer we get to “normality”
the quicker we reject those bonds and revert back to our ingrained behaviours.
This is all fascinating and deeply engrossing stuff – and
it’s the sort of material you can reflect on over and over again. Roeg mixes this
in with plenty of dark comparisons between our soulless modern world and the
“savage” world of the Aboriginals – a comparison never flattering to the modern
world. Roeg uses intercutting to point these up, particularly between the
hunting of the Aboriginal boy, his respectful killing of a kangaroo, and our
own mechanical slaughter and processing of meat. Now to be honest these sort of
cutbacks are thuddingly dated and heavy-handed – the sort of holier-than-thou
opinion making that quickly gets on the nerves.
A few of these sequences do work well. Near the end, the
Aboriginal boy hunts when he is nearly crushed by a truck carrying two modern
hunters. The truck skids to a halt and the hunters gun down several animals
(the rather tiresome editing uses a series of still shots, crash zooms and
distorted sounds) while the Aborigine looks on with confusion and disdain. In
another sequence, the white woman the Aborigine met heads back to a settlement,
where white men seem to be exploiting Aboriginal labour. She sits sadly on the
bed staring into the distance. Moments like this, despite the often dated
editorial tricks, do carry a real sense of the divide between two cultures.
Other sections of the film make similar points about the
wildness of both the outback and the city world, but with increasingly dated
and tired visual tricks – do we really need an umpteenth shot of maggots eating
a corpse? Or more quiet pans along cold 1970s commercial surfaces? This is a
shame, as the photography is beautiful. Roeg has an eye for a brilliant image –
his shots of the Australian outback are some of the best use of sun and desert
on film since Lawrence of Arabia. The
film’s shots of the desert are simply stunning, with Roeg’s hypnotic series of
images guaranteed to not only haunt your mind, but also to show an angle on the
world you won’t have seen before.
Walkabout may be slightly
dated in some of its production and editing techniques, but it’s a deeply
thoughtful, unsettling work that asks profound and difficult questions about civilisation,
life and death – the sort of film that rewards revisiting and reinterpretation.
While many parts of it clunk in places, or have a distinct 1970s flashiness in
their filmmaking, when it moves away from these rather clumsy ideas to deal
with concepts that are more spiritual and intriguing, it’s a fascinating film.
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