AA | 1h 40min | Adventure, Drama | Australia/UK
Director: Nicolas Roeg
Writers: Edward Bond (screenplay), Donald G. Payne (novel) (as James Vance Marshall)
Stars: Jenny Agutter, David Gulpilil, Luc Roeg
Two city-bred siblings are stranded in the Australian Outback, where they learn to survive with the aid of an Aboriginal boy on his "walkabout": a ritual separation from his tribe.
Seminal.
One of the first films in the Australian New Wave cinema movement, it received positive reviews despite being a commercial failure. Alongside Wake in Fright, it was one of two Australian films entered in competition for the Grand Prix du Festival at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. It is also held to be one of Roeg's masterpieces, along with Performance (1970), Don't Look Now (1973), and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). In 2005, the British Film Institute included it in their list of the "50 films you should see by the age of 14".
Plot
A white, city-dwelling teenaged schoolgirl, her younger brother and their father drive far into the Australian outback, ostensibly for a picnic. The father goes berserk and suddenly begins shooting at the children. They run behind rocks for cover, whereupon he sets the car on fire and shoots himself in the head. The girl conceals the suicide from her brother, retrieves some picnic food, and leads him away from the scene, attempting to walk home through the desert.
By the middle of the next day, they are weak and the boy can barely walk. Discovering a small water hole with a fruiting tree, they spend the day playing, bathing, and resting. By the next morning, the water has dried up. They are then discovered by an Aboriginal boy. Although the girl cannot communicate with him, due to the language barrier, her brother mimes their need for water and the newcomer cheerfully shows them how to draw it from the drying bed of the oasis. The three travel together, with the Aboriginal boy sharing food he has caught from hunting. The boys learn to communicate slightly using words and sign language.
While in the vicinity of a plantation, a white woman walks past the Aboriginal boy, who simply ignores her when she speaks to him. She appears to see the other children, but they do not see her, and they continue on their journey. The children also discover a weather balloon belonging to a nearby research team working in the desert. After drawing markings of a modern-style house, the Aboriginal boy eventually leads them to an abandoned farm, and takes the small boy to a nearby road. The Aboriginal boy hunts down a water buffalo and is wrestling it to the ground when two white hunters appear in a truck and nearly run him over. He watches in shock as they shoot several buffalo with a rifle. The boy then returns to the farm, but passes by without speaking.
Later, the Aboriginal boy lies in a trance among a slew of buffalo bones, having painted himself in ceremonial markings. He returns to the farmhouse, catching the undressing girl by surprise, and initiates a mating ritual by performing a courtship dance in front of her. Although he dances outside all day and into the night until he becomes exhausted, she is frightened and hides from him, and tells her brother they will leave him the next day. In the morning, after they dress in their school uniforms, the brother takes her to the Aboriginal boy's body, hanging in a tree. Before leaving, the girl wipes ants from the dead boy's chest. Hiking up the road, the siblings find a nearly-deserted mining town where a surly employee directs them towards nearby accommodation.
Much later, a businessman arrives home as the now grown-up girl prepares dinner; while he embraces her and relates office gossip, she either imagines or remembers a scene in which she, her brother, and the Aboriginal boy are playing and swimming naked in a billabong in the outback.
Themes
Jenny Agutter regards the film as multi-layered; on one hand it is a story about children lost in the outback finding their way, and on the other it is an allegorical tale about society and the loss of innocence. Louis Nowra noted that biblical imagery runs through the film; in one scene there is a cut to a subliminal flashback of the father's suicide, but the scene plays in reverse and the father rises up as if he has been "resurrected".
Many writers have also drawn a direct parallel between the depiction of the Outback and the Garden of Eden, with Nowra observing that this went as far as to include "portents of a snake slithering across the bare branches of the tree" above Jenny Agutter's character as she sleeps. Gregory Stephens, an associate professor of English, sees the film framed as a typical "back to Eden" story, including common motifs from 1960s counterculture; he offers the skinny-dipping sequence as an example of a "symbolic shedding of the clothes of the over-civilized world". By way of the girl's rejection of the Aboriginal boy and his subsequent death the film paints the Outback as "an Eden that can only ever be lost". Agutter shares a similar interpretation, noting "we cannot go back and have that Garden of Eden. We cannot go back and make it innocent again." Agutter considers the ages of the two adolescents, who are on the cusp of adulthood and losing their childhood innocence, as a metaphor for the irreversible change wrought by Western civilisation.
Reception
Critic Roger Ebert called it "one of the great films". He writes that it contains little moral or emotional judgement of its characters, and ultimately is a portrait of isolation in proximity. At the time, he stated: "Is it a parable about noble savages and the crushed spirits of city dwellers? That's what the film's surface suggests, but I think it's about something deeper and more elusive: the mystery of communication." Film critic Edward Guthmann also notes the strong use of exotic natural images, calling them a "chorus of lizards". In Walkabout, an analysis of the film, author Louis Nowra wrote: "I was stunned. The images of the Outback were of an almost hallucinogenic intensity. Instead of the desert and bush being infused with a dull monotony, everything seemed acute, shrill, and incandescent. The Outback was beautiful and haunting."
Walkabout features several scenes of animal hunting and killing, such as a kangaroo being speared and bludgeoned to death. The Cinematograph Films (Animals) Act 1937 makes it illegal in the United Kingdom to distribute or exhibit material where the production involved inflicting pain or terror on an animal. Since the animals did not appear to suffer or be in distress the film was deemed to not contravene the Act.
The film includes scenes of nudity featuring Jenny Agutter, who the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) surmised was 17 years old at the time of filming. The scenes did not pose a problem when submitted to the BBFC in 1971 and later in 1998. The Protection of Children Act 1978 prohibited distribution and possession of indecent images of people under the age of 16 so the issue of potential indecency had not been considered on previous occasions. However, the Sexual Offences Act 2003 raised the age threshold to 18 which meant the BBFC was required to consider the scenes of nudity in the context of the new law when the film was re-submitted in 2011. The BBFC reviewed the scenes and considered them not to be indecent and passed the film uncut.
Legacy
Commenting on the film's enduring appeal, Roeg described the film in 1998 as "a simple story about life and being alive, not covered with sophistry but addressing the most basic human themes; birth, death, mutability."
More than 40 years after its release, on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a score of 84% based on reviews from 37 critics, with an average rating of 8.2 out of 10.
Review of Walkabout (1971)
On one level, Walkabout works as a simple survival
story: a teenage white British girl and her younger brother are stranded in the
Australian Outback, unable to defend for themselves. Along comes the ‘noble
savage’ Aboriginal young man, who saves them, by using his knowledge of the
land to find water and hunt. Without him, they might well have perished. But Walkabout
cannot help but make you sense that Nicolas Roeg was doing more than simply
telling a story of survival in the harsh, unforgiving wild.
It is called Walkabout as
it is named after an Aboriginal custom of sending young men on the cusp of
adulthood out into the wild to fend for themselves and live (or die) off the
land, the idea being that if this often months’ long épreuve results in
the boy-man returning intact and very much alive to his community, he will have
successfully transitioned into adulthood, and will be ready to assume the roles
that entails.
The film begins in the concrete
canyons of Sydney, where families live stacked above one another in
condominiums. We glimpse moments in the lives of such a family--a housewife
listens to a radio show, two children splash in a pool, and on a balcony their
father drinks a cocktail and looks down angrily at them. There is something just
ever so slightly wrong with this family, but the film doesn't articulate it. In
the next scene, we see the father and children driving into the trackless
outback in an old Volkswagen. They're on a picnic, the children think, until
their father starts shooting at them. The 14-year-old girl (Jenny Agutter)
pulls her 6-year-old brother (Luc Roeg) behind a ridge, and when they look
again their father has shot himself and the car is on fire.
So the system has failed him. Now
the girl and boy face destruction at the hands of nature. They have the clothes
they are wearing, a battery-operated radio, and whatever food and drink was in
the picnic. They wander the outback for a number of days (the film is always
vague about time – for reasons I will mention later), and happen upon an oasis
with a pool of muddy water. Here they drink and splash about and sleep, and in
the morning the pool has dried up. At about this time they realize that a young
aborigine (David Gulpilil) is regarding them.
They need saving. He saves them.
He possesses secrets of survival, which the film reveals in scenes of timeless
beauty and savagery. We see the youth hunting wild creatures, and finding water
in the dry pool with the use of a hollow straw. He treats the child's sunburn
with a natural remedy. Some of the outback scenes--including one where the
youth spears a kangaroo--are interspersed with quick flashes of a butcher shop.
Man's ways remain unchanged across the board.
There is a sexual undercurrent: both
teenagers are in the first years of increased sexual awareness. The girl still
wears a uniform that the camera regards with suggestiveness. (An earlier shot
suggests that the father has a rather lustily awareness of his own daughter's
body.) The restored footage includes a sequence showing the girl swimming naked
in a pool, and scenes of the aborigine indicate he is displaying his manhood
for her to appreciate.
These developments are surrounded
by scenes of indifferent--but beautiful--nature. Roeg shows us lizards,
scorpions, snakes, kangaroos, birds. They are not photographed nostalgically. Let
us not forget that they make a living by eating other things.
Aboriginal culture has a less
linear sense of time than that of our clock-bound one, and the timeline of the
movie suggests that. Does everything happen exactly in the sequence it is
shown? Does everything even happen at all? Are some moments imagined? Which of
the characters imagines them? These questions lurk around the edges of the story,
which is seemingly simple: The three young travellers survive in the outback
because of the aborigine's skills. And communication is always a problem,
although interestingly more so for the girl than for her little brother, who
seems to have a child's ability to cut straight through the language to the
message.
There's one fascinating scene
where the travellers actually pass close to a village; the aborigine sees it,
but does not lead the others to the top of a rise where they could see it, too.
Is he hiding it from them? Or does he not understand why they would be seeking
it? There's also a haunting scene where they explore an empty farmhouse; she weeps
while looking at some photographs, and he observes her carefully as she does
so. And finally, a scene where the aborigine paints himself in tribal designs
and performs a courtship dance. The girl is not interested, and the distance
between the two civilizations remains as wide as ever.
What should we have been
expecting, in all seriousness, given the premise of the film? That the girl and
her brother learn to embrace a lifestyle that is more rooted in nature than
their own one? That the aborigine learn and embrace their world of skyscrapers
and the rush of city life? That the two teenagers fall in love and agree to
live a Rousseau-like existence in the beauty of the natural world?
The film remains steadfast in not
letting any of this happen. Like its lizards that sit unblinking in the sun, it
has no fixed plans for them either.
In Walkabout, the key is
that the two teenagers never find a way to communicate, not even by using sign
language – neither do either of them show the presence of mind to ever veer far
off their own customs, nor the humility to even assume that perhaps their own
way is not the right way – or only way. Indeed, they both show a huge lack of
curiosity in each other’s customs and cultures, ultimately. When the
mating-ritual clearly ignites no reciprocal desires in the girl, it is over for
him. These are people trapped in their own societal templates, unable to see
the world any other way. Death for the aborigine, like for their father, was
inevitable, because in their worlds, they had both failed.
The movie is not a lovely parable
about how human beings can find universality of existence across cultures: it
may actually be the total opposite of that. Maybe it’s about how we’re all of
us are stuck in our own beliefs, and we all lack the imagination and/or insight
to perceive the world in any other way, stubbornly clinging on to our own
mores, even when letting go of them would be clearly preferable.
And yet is it really as
pessimistic as all that? Are we all merely ‘victims’ of the environment we are
born into, its inevitable mouldings, set in stone, destined never to change? I
don’t think so. For all the brutal twists of the story, and the misery of the
two people who end their own lives, a light shines through. In the final scene
of the film, many years later, the girl (now woman) is newly married, and as
she hugs her husband, her mind takes her back to an idyllic scene of paradise
lost: on a beautiful day, alone in the world with just her, her brother and the
Aborigine, bathing in a pool of clear water, under the dappled shade of the
trees. The sky is blue, the water translucent, and smiles reign in this
timeless paradise. They were all happy. Paradise has been lost, but that doesn’t
mean it never existed.