Walkabout (film)
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| Walkabout | |
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| Directed by | Nicolas Roeg |
| Produced by | Si Litvinoff |
| Written by | Edward Bond, based on the novel by James Vance Marshall |
| Starring | Jenny Agutter Luc Roeg David Gulpilil John Meillon |
| Music by | John Barry |
| Cinematography | Nicolas Roeg |
| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox |
| Release date(s) |  October 1971 June 1971 |
| Running time | 100 min. |
| Language | English |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Walkabout is a 1971 British film set in Australia. It was directed by Nicolas Roeg and written by the playwright Edward Bond, loosely based on the novel of the same name by James Vance Marshall.
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[edit] Synopsis
A teenage English girl (Jenny Agutter) and her young brother (played by the director's son, Luc Roeg) are driven into the Australian outback by their father, who is suffering from a mental breakdown. Their father tries to shoot his son before dousing gasoline on himself and the car and setting it, and himself, on fire. The children are stranded in the desert.
The sister decides the best course of action is to strike out into the desert. Several days later, lost and succumbing to the elements, they encounter an Australian Aborigine teen (David Gulpilil) who is on walkabout, a rite of passage requiring him to survive on his own for six months as an initiation into manhood. Gradually the three fall into the rhythms of family life, unconsciously assuming the roles of mother, father, and child. One possible metaphor of the watering hole is the Garden of Eden. The boy and girl discard their last vestiges of English decorum and all swim together naked, and shameless. The little boy learns to communicate with the native and serves as the interpreter for the other two. However, there are limits to how much he can do in this role: the very idea of sex is totally beyond him.
They resume their trek across the barren outback, the aboriginal briefly encountering a bitter white woman whose husband runs a plaster of paris factory in the desert. (This surreal encounter is missing from some versions of the film.)[citation needed] We then see a group of scientists launching a weather balloon: one of them is a beautiful woman who is perceived as a sex object by the male scientists who play cards with a deck that has pictures of nude women on it. The three young people later find the weather balloon but never meet the scientists.
Eventually the aboriginal leads the Caucasian kids back to "civilization", or at least to an abandoned farmhouse surrounded by freshly dug graves. However, he then begins a strange dance while wearing makeup that makes his face look like a skull. The sister is frightened, and stays out of his way. The aboriginal hangs himself from a tree limb that night. The sister and her brother escape down a road, where they eventually make it back to civilization.
Years later, the sister is a grown woman dutifully married to the "right man with the right job". As he discusses office politics, she fondly remembers swimming naked with her little brother and the aboriginal. We see the watering hole again, through the lens of memory as the credits roll and the narrator recites a selection from A. E. Houseman's "A Shropshire Lad:"
Into my heart on 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.
[edit] Style
The film includes numerous examples of Roeg's trademark editing style. Roeg frequently intercuts events taking place at different locations and times; for example, when the three children are playing in a tree, the shots are intercut with images of an Aboriginal tribe discovering the burnt car and corpse of the father. He also uses intellectual montage (the creation of meanings by juxtaposing two shots that are not literally connected); for example, when the Aboriginal boy is killing a kangaroo, Roeg includes brief shots of a western butcher's shop, and thus invites us to compare or contrast the two methods of food production. The film, critical as it is of "civilization", casts an equally depressing eye towards primitive life, which quite literally, is filmed as "red in tooth and claw". However, we also see very peaceful scenes, such as a wombat sniffing at night at the little blonde boy, who smiles in his sleep.
[edit] Differences between book and film
- In the book, the Caucasian kids are Americans. In the movie, they are English.
- In the book, they are survivors of an airplane crash.
[edit] External links
| Preceded by: Hard Boiled |
The Criterion Collection 10 |
Succeeded by: The Seventh Seal |
