Walkabout (film)
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| Walkabout | |
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 DVD cover of Walkabout |
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| Directed by | Nicolas Roeg |
| Produced by | Si Litvinoff |
| Written by | Edward Bond James Vance Marshall (novel) |
| 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. |
| Country | U.K. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | AUD 1,000,000 (estimated) |
| 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 but credited as Lucien John) are driven into the Australian outback by their father, who is suffering from a mental breakdown. Their father tries to shoot his children during a picnic, but ultimately misses and douses his car in gasoline and sets it alight, before shooting himself in the head.
The children, now stranded in the desert, strike out in search of the nearest civilization. Several days later, still lost and suffering from exposure, they find an oasis where they spend the day. By morning however, the oasis has dried up, but their despair is interrupted by the appearance of a teenage aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) spear-hunting a lizard not far from them. The aboriginal is on walkabout, a rite of passage requiring him to survive on his own for six months as an initiation into manhood, but readily helps them survive in the outback.
Gradually the three fall into the rhythms of family life, subconsciously assuming the roles of mother, father, and child. The sister and brother discard their last vestiges of British decorum and all swim together shamelessly naked. The little boy learns to communicate with the native and serves as the interpreter for the other two.
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] A group is then seen releasing a weather balloon. One of them is a beautiful woman scientist who is perceived as a sex object by the males, 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 encounter the researchers.
Eventually the aboriginal leads the sister and brother back to "civilization", an abandoned farmhouse surrounded by freshly dug graves. He shows the brother a nearby road leading to a mining town. The aboriginal begins a courting dance around the girl, frightening her into shutting herself up in the house. When she awakes the next morning, her brother shows her that the rejected aboriginal has hanged himself from a tree limb during the night. The siblings walk down the road, eventually making it back to civilization.
Years later, the sister is shown married and living in the same apartment complex she grew up in, listening to her husband discuss office politics. Her mind wanders, and she fondly flashes back to her time spent in the outback, the movie closing with a montage of the sister, brother and aborigine swimming naked together, while a narrator recites a selection from A. E. Housman'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 is an example of Roeg's trademark editing style, frequently cutting between two scenes taking place at different locations or times - such as the shots of the three children playing and climbing over a tree, with the shots of the aboriginal tribe playing and climbing over the burnt-out husk of the father's car.
The film also employs intellectual montage, the creation of symbolism through juxtaposing two shots that are not literally connected - for example the scene in which the aboriginal boy is seen killing a kangaroo, is interrupted by several brief clips of a butcher at work in his shop, contrasting the methods of food production.
While the film is easily categorized as critical of "civilization", it casts an equally depressing eye towards primitive life. Roeg himself has said that the ending scene is about how the sister has gone from being lost in the outback, yet remains lost even when returned to civilization, and that her time with the aborigine didn't help her.
The film earned Roeg a nomination for the Golden Palm award.
[edit] Differences between book and film
- In the book, the brother and sister are Americans. In the movie, they are English.
- In the book, they are survivors of an airplane crash.
[edit] External links
 Cinema of Australia |
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Film chronology: 1890s-1930s • 1940s-1970s • 1980s • 1990s • 2000s |
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