SYNOPSICS
Walkabout (1971) is a English,Aboriginal,Czech,French movie. Nicolas Roeg has directed this movie. Jenny Agutter,David Gulpilil,Luc Roeg,John Meillon are the starring of this movie. It was released in 1971. Walkabout (1971) is considered one of the best Adventure,Drama movie in India and around the world.
A privileged British family consisting of a mother, a geologist father and an adolescent daughter and son, live in Sydney, Australia. Out of circumstance, the siblings, not knowing exactly where they are, get stranded in the Outback by themselves while on a picnic. They only have with them the clothes on their backs - their school uniforms - some meagre rations of nonperishable food, a battery-powered transistor radio, the son's satchel primarily containing his toys, and a small piece of cloth they used as their picnic drop-cloth. While they walk through the Outback, sometimes looking as though near death, they come across an Australian boy who is on his walkabout, a rite of passage into manhood where he spends months on end on his own living off the land. Their largest problem is not being able to verbally communicate. The boy does help them to survive, but doesn't understand their need to return to civilization, which may or may not happen based on what the Australian boy ends up ...
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Walkabout (1971) Reviews
Landmark near masterpiece of the cultural clash between nature and civilisation
Director Nicolas Roeg's (`Don't Look Now') cinematographic skills and admiration pay especial tribute to Walkabout's powerful combination of Australia's awesome scenic diversity and the sensual Jenny Agutter, and the whole effect is embellished by John Barry's sublimely magical score. I would hasten to add that as well as being very pleasing to watch, enhanced by Roeg's voyeuristic use of the camera, Agutter provides a skilful performance as a prejudiced unworldly teenager, who is naively unaware of the sexuality she exudes whether naked or wearing her high cut school skirt. Although it was a somewhat amusing shock to recently discover that a body double was employed for Agutter in the shower scenes for `An American Werewolf in London', no such deceit was used in this film. Immediately after filming `Walkabout', Agutter reprised her BBC serialisation role of two years earlier as Bobbie for Lionel Jeffries' sumptuous version of Edith Nesbit's `The Railway Children', ensuring her immortalization as an iconographic beauty. She graduated thirty years on into the role of the mother for a Carlton TV production and is currently involved in producing a film script about the life of the author. On a deadly picnic into the desert a father (John Meillon; `Crocodile Dundee') inexplicably snaps, shooting at his two children before torching his car and turning the gun on himself. Now the children, absurdly kitted out in their formal school uniforms, are lost and carelessly lose their provisions, except for the transistor radio with its inane babble being another illustration of how hopeless our technology is against nature. Fortuitously they stumble upon an oasis and find their only saviour in the form of an Aborigine (David Gulpilil; `Rabbit Proof Fence') on a rites-of-passage walkabout. The seven year old boy (Lucien John, the director's son) happily has a child's ability to communicate with the Aborigine despite the language barrier, something his older sister never grasps, deftly demonstrated on their first encounter when she is increasingly frustrated by the lack of comprehension of her demands for water. Roeg crosscuts stunning kaleidoscopic images of the physical landscape and its critters, with the killing of animals and the domestic butchering of joints of meat to give a stark contrast between nature and civilisation. However, given this was his first solo effort, his overworked montages can be a little irritating and confusing, and show off the cinematographer rather than the director in Roeg. The director emphasises the unrealised sexual tension by explicitly marrying shots of both the teenagers with suggestive trees in the form of intertwined human limbs, as well as providing us with a diverting interlude involving a group of meteorologists. The deeply sad misunderstanding of the two cultures gives poignancy to the film that is its strength, especially delineated by the Aborigine's tribal courtship dance for Agutter, which only serves to terrify her and increase her distrust. Her lack of emotion for their former helpmate is staggering. When faced with a dangling corpse the girl asks trivial questions of her brother about his breakfast whilst pointlessly picking ants off the body. The tragic outcome is also indicative of the current state of Aboriginal life expectancy with a higher proportion dying through accident, assault and self-harm than any other Australian demographic group. The failure of her parents to prepare her for the change from childhood may have contributed to the tragedy, and it is only on reflection years later, living the same life as her parents and similarly caged in an apartment block, that Agutter's character senses that maybe she missed her chance. It is interesting to note that the children are deliberately English to highlight the cultural clash between the European settlers and the original inhabitants of this ancient land, and I wonder if similarly white Australians would have had any more understanding of the indigenous customs of the Aborigine boy. `Walkabout' is a far more visual depiction of sexual awakening colliding with alien cultures than that other famous picnic that goes horribly wrong in Peter Weir's `Picnic at Hanging Rock' (which this predates by four years), with its metaphorically implied unease centred on a sacred Aboriginal site that eventually destroys the established order of a Ladies College. `Walkabout' is as relevant today as when it was released in the era of 70's industrialisation with the Kakadu National Park once again under threat from a new uranium mine on its boundary. The Northern Territory's tribe Mirrar is currently involved in this dispute over land rights and excavations, although mining was temporarily ceased on Aboriginal land in the mid 1990's. This is a sensitive issue as Australia's economy relies on the export of uranium in the production of nuclear power, and Aborigines oppose the exploitation of the Earth's resources for profit. The company at the centre of this discord also operates the Ranger mine which is depicted along with the rock band Midnight Oil (well known for their campaigning land rights missive `Beds Are Burning') in eX de Medici's `Nothing's As Precious As A Hole In The Ground', a recent acquisition by Australia's National Portrait Gallery. Despite last year's rush by some of Hollywood's well-known directors returning home to make Aboriginal films, including Phillip Noyce's `Rabbit Proof Fence' (released 21 February) about the Stolen Generation', and `Yolngu Boy' which did well at a film festival in Colorado, I sadly suspect very few of us in the UK are likely to see them. Apparently there has not been a commercial success for a black-themed movie since 1955's `Jedda', the first Australian feature to star Aboriginal actors. If the hope of a 70's New Wave style revival is to be realised for Australian cinema, surely it is time for the industry worldwide to wake up to the fact that a wealth of film exists outside of Hollywood, and that the viewing public may actually welcome some variety. With the release of the director's full cut in 1998 both the DVD and the video are unusually available for the UK as well as the US from Amazon.
INNOCENCE
Goodness gracious it's amazing how many reviewers missed the most obvious aspect of the film. This tale is about innocence and it approaches that from many different angles. As for Roeg practicing camera tricks-maybe today these are tricks but at the time the style was a pioneering method of telling and showing psychological elements, wasted on todays audiences. Roeg presents innocence in juxtaposition with the hardness and neuroses of society, not as WHITEMAN BAD but as society, modern society makes us very neurotic by taking away our innocence. Roeg makes an brilliant point and stylizes a mostly nonverbal experience by letting us journey with children all on the cusp of some new stage of growth. This movie is a small masterpiece!!
Who Says Silent Cinema Is Dead?
Although this is a sound film, and the characters talk to one another, this film could have been made just as well in the 1920s. It does not really need sound. The film is about nature, and man's relationship with it. If a civilised person were left out in the desert, then they would soon die. But, as this film shows, there are people and creatures living out there quite happily. The film has been criticised for having a weak beginning and a weak end. But where does the story of this film start? And where and when would you end it? Yes you can end it when the two children get back to civilisation. But does the story end there? No. Because of their experiences, things are never going to be the same again. And for them, the story has not finished, it is only just beginning. I have seen this film several times and I notice something different every time I see it.
The Australian outback comes alive.
Superb cinematography, the Australian outback comes alive in this film of self discovery and regret. Agutter plays the English girl brilliantly, incapable of comprehending anybody or anything that doesn't conform to her middle-class values and upbringing. Roeg is also excellent as her brother, adapting to each and every change in circumstance as only children can. I have watched this movie many times, and always get something new from it. Highly recommended to anyone, although parents might want to watch it before letting their kids see it.
A very beautiful and mysterious film.
"In Australia, when an Aborigine man-child reaches sixteen, he is sent out into the land. For months he must live from it. Sleep on it. Eat of its fruit and flesh. Stay alive. Even if it means killing his fellow creatures. The Aborigines call it the WALKABOUT. This is the story of a 'WALKABOUT'." Thus begins Nicolas Roeg's 1971 debut feature, "Walkabout", one of the most beautiful, mystical, and magical film I've had the privilege of seeing as a filmgoer. Seeing it again recently on the beautiful Criterion edition DVD, I was once more captivated by this film as it slowly worked its magic on me. The "plot" of "Walkabout" is simplicity itself: a teenage girl (Jenny Agutter) and her little brother (the director's son in real life, Lucien John Roeg--billed "Lucien John" on the credits) are stranded on an Australian outback as their father, who took them out for a picnic, suddenly and inexplicably commits suicide. The two of them are thus left wandering by themselves and it looks as if they will die in the vast wilderness--until they encounter an Aborigine boy who is on his "walkabout," an Aborigine rite of passage into manhood. For a time these kids travel together as a trio and the Aborigine's skills in hunting and finding water allow them to survive. And although the girl and her brother will eventually find their way back to civilization, for a brief unspecified length of time the exotic Australian outback becomes a wondrous and mystical place where their story of survival unfolds. If you've seen this film, you know that the brief synopsis above doesn't really touch what is so special about "Walkabout." And that is because "Walkabout" isn't really about plot, like more conventional films. It is one of those rare films like Peter Weir's "Picnic at Hanging Rock," Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven," and Wim Wender's "Wings of Desire" which are all about evoking a kind of sad and bittersweet emotional response from us. I think that is what "Walkabout" is mostly about. The overall impact of this film "hits you in the heart" and very impressionable viewers might be stirred in their emotions to the point of swooning in the scene at the end where the girl, now a married woman, remembers her idyllic days happily swimming in one of the outback's water holes Nicolas Roeg was not only the director of "Walkabout" but also its cinematographer. And his photography in this film is unbearably beautiful and sumptuous. "Walkabout" is without a doubt one of the most gorgeous color films ever made. Shot on location in the Australian outback--perhaps one of the most exotic places on earth--"Walkabout" has a visual grandeur that is reminiscent of passages from David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" and John Ford's "The Searchers." Never has the "voodoo of location shooting" (as Werner Herzog likes to call it) been more manifest than in this film. In fact, the exotic and unique location in which it was shot, coupled with Roeg's masterful cinematography, feels like one of the main characters in "Walkabout." The film's location adds a mystical (almost spiritual) and meditative dimension to it which lingers in the viewer's mind--haunting it long after the film is over. If Roeg's photography is one of the film's main characters, so is John Barry's legendary and justly famous score. Maybe it's the harp used in the score, or the subtle billowing quality of its composition (i.e. the way its beautiful melody gently builds and builds), but the music in this film simply soars. It moves me like no other score I've ever heard. It feels completely transcendent, as if it exists outside time and space altogether--but gently swooping down from time to time, "kissing" this film's images with aching sweetness. All of the above elements work together to form a film-viewing experience that inspires both beauty and awe in us. The film's message is not necessarily that life in the outback is better than life in a modern civilization, but that no matter where you happen to find yourself (even if that happens to be a wilderness like the Australian outback), if you have resources that meet your basic needs, it can become your "home" for a time. And that afterwards there is bitter-sweetness in reminiscing about those "good times" you were fortunate enough to have--to which you can never return again.