Walkabout: Criterion #10

"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.

Hard Boiled: Criterion #9

There is no subtlety whatsoever to John Woo’s “Hard Boiled” the follow-up to his action melodrama “The Killer.” “Hard Boiled” strips away much of the previous film’s labored sentiment and replaces it with insane action set-pieces involving babies in peril, motorcycles exploding in midair, and hundreds of thugs and cops flying through glass windows. So many glass windows. Yet “Hard Boiled” is also insanely fun in its ludicrousness. There is not one shred of realism in this go for broke, surprisingly gory, action extravaganza, and we are thankfully spared much of Woo’s heavy handed take on the duality of man, nature of evil, and spiritual concerns. There are also blessedly no doves whatsoever in this film. Woo’s films are better when he keeps his rote, superficial philosophizing to a minimum and lets his flair for berserko action take center stage.

The plot is simple if not always coherent. Rogue super cop Tequila (Chow Yun-Fat) is out to avenge the death of his partner at the hands of Triad gun smugglers. While gunning down mob thugs, Tequila comes face-to-face with an undercover cop, played by Tony Leung, who is continually forced to compromise his own values in order to remain undercover. In Leung, Woo is able to examine his favorite theme of man being neither completely good nor wholly evil, but unlike in “The Killer,” “Hard Boiled” doesn’t dwell on this theme interminably and the film is the film is stronger for it.

John Woo, a Christian, displays substantial gore in this film with many highly stylized shots of arteries being severed followed by blood splattering onto faces, glass windows, and white walls. The heroes and villains also possess an insane tendency to create mayhem in the midst of crowded restaurants and hospitals where innocent bystanders are picked off quickly and by the hundreds. Had the film been a mainstream US release, its gory action scenes would have assuredly caught the attention of congress persons displaying election year “what about the children” concerns about media violence. The berserk violence of “Hard Boiled” is not an afterthought, though. It is, instead, the point of the whole bloody exercise. Remove the film’s stylized bloodletting and it would lose its pulse.

Maybe it says something about this viewer that Woo’s restrained by comparison and morally concerned “The Killer” came off as lackluster, while the more bloody, less talky cut to the chase “Hard Boiled” struck me as a wildly successful genre exercise. “The Killer” had a classical tragic story arc while the story of “Hard Boiled” is mostly a device to deliver mayhem. But “The Killer” was frequently heavy handed and Woo spends much of his film developing his hero’s thin personalities. Character development does not play to Woo’s strengths. He is at his best when choreographing death and destruction.

Woo makes several appearances in “Hard Boiled” as the owner of The Jazz Bar where Tequila plays tenor sax after hours. He is the film’s moral voice and offers meta-commentary on the action, but never overstays his welcome. These are light mostly insubstantial moments that clue you in to the fact that “Hard Boiled” is more concerned with obliterating man than examining his soul.

Next Up: Nicolas Roeg’s “Walkabout.”

(John Woo wanted Chow Yun-Fat play a jazz musician in “The Killer,” but producers balked at the lead’s embrace of this American art form. Jazz enthusiast Woo, though, got his wish with “Hard Boiled” and he features a long opening sequence where super cop Tequila wails on his sax.)