"Walkabout" is an often disorienting experience that offers the audience a bare amount of exposition. There is a violent unsettling act early in the story of wilderness survival that sets the story in motion, but is never explained. The question of why is important, but not knowing the answer is just as necessary and in not providing an answer director Nicolas Roeg is stretching our brain muscles and
removing the safety netting. We start the movie disoriented, lost and this is a deliberate choice by its creator. "Walkabout" is a dangerous movie about seemingly irrational acts of violence and the violent and rational cycle of life played out in nature. It's also about man's uneasy relationship with the frequently violent natural world and how this relationship defines us.
Nicolas Roeg is a master craftsman who in this film is more comfortableconveying meaning through montage than filmed conversation. "Walkabout"opens with a dialogue-free tour of modern-day (circa 1960s) industrial Australia. Machines click clack, cars honk, and butchers slice withcold mechanical precision. Even the film's lead (played by JennyAgutter and referred to as Girl in the credits) is trapped in a mechanical role as she and her classmates steadily drone and sputter in a classroom voice exercise. The modern world is cold, angular, gray, impersonal. Contrast the cold grays of urban Australia with the brilliant rust-colored sands of the film's wild outback setting. These are two vastly different worlds and successfully moving from one to another proves impossible for everyone in the movie.
The film's simple story finds actress Jenny Agutter and the director's young son Luc Roeg abandoned in the Australian outback and details their attempt to survive. During their journey they meet a helpful Aboriginal teenager on his walkabout, a rite of passage where a young man is left to the wilderness to survive on his own. A nagging question tugs at us throughout the film as we wonder if the Aboriginal teen is irreparably harming his quest as he becomes more involved in the lives of the two city dwellers. As the trio wanders through the wilderness, the children, who arrived in the outback in formal school uniforms, slowly shed their outfits as they begin to adapt to the natural world.
As mentioned, "Walkabout" is a story about violence and Roeg's film is filled with much violent efficiency as insects strip down carrion, rust reclaims abandoned mining outposts, men slaughter wildlife for sustenance and sport, and the native peoples of the outback pick over a burnt and abandoned automobile. Those who would claim "Walkabout" is a simplistic fable about returning to nature and living simply neglect how unforgiving the outback is in the film. It readily consumes anything that stands still. Life in the wilderness is short and brutal, but Roeg does seem to be saying that the trappings of modern life are noise that distracts us from our finite nature and inevitability that the land will one day reclaim us for its own.
The existence of the British interlopers is simplified as they focus on the essential concerns of finding food, water, and shelter. In an existence stripped down to essential needs, a sexual longing quickly develops between the Aboriginal teen and the girl he is shepherding through the wilderness. Roeg's treatment of this inevitability is frank, insistent, and sure to make many viewers ill at ease although it never seems forced or unnatural. This is a film about being guided by essential needs when removed from the concerns of modern existence. Roeg's frank examination of sexuality is more anthropological than titillating.
The film is finally beautifully elliptical. "Walkabout" is about cycles--renewal, destruction, repeat. The film is bookended by unsettling deaths the causes of which the movie does not explain, but which can be readily discerned by the attentive viewer. "Walkabout" works on a basic emotional level while viewing it, but then expands in significance after the film is turned off and reflected upon. "Walkabout" may be a hard film to love as it is deliberately disorienting and holds that life is brutal and short. But it is a film that is hard to not to appreciate as one peels back its layers after viewing. Most multiplex bon bons quickly pass from memory once we have stepped outside the theater, but "Walkabout" plants itself firmly in the brain and lives on long after the movie has ended.
A great work of art and essential viewing.
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