Nicholas Roeg has this thing for sex and hidden menace. He even turns the fork of a tree into an obscene photograph. And the teen aged Jenny Agutter is no help either, running around in this skimpy skirt or in her underwear or sometimes nothing at all, which is nice. Meanwhile anything can happen. There's death around every corner.
It's a simple story on the face of it. A father -- one of those Richard Cory types -- takes his kids (Agutter and Luc Roeg) for a drive into the desert. He parks the car for a picnic in the middle of nowhere and tries to shoot them -- rather a shocking moment since the film hasn't set it up. Failing that, he sets fire to the car and blows out his brains.
The two kids must get home but they go about it in the dumbest way imaginable. Instead of following the car's tire tracks back to a road they take off in a random direction. And, really, since they were driven inland from Sidney (Adelaide in the novel), they ought to head east towards the sea, meaning they should walk towards the rising sun.
But, man, these kids are out of their element. If it weren't for their accidentally running into aboriginal David Gumpilil, they wouldn't get very far. Fortunately he knows how to extract a living from what seems to be a most unpromising environment. He hunts and he gathers, as hunters and gatherers do, and there are some unpleasant scenes of real animals being speared to death. It's like watching a movie in Anthropology 101. Still, Gumpilil kills only to eat, and otherwise lives in harmony with nature.
Roeg's film alas contrasts Gumpilil's cheerful optimism and, finally, his mortal love for Agutter, with the ways of the white folks. They seem uniformly nuts, wasteful, and unfriendly. They shoot and kill buffalo for no evident reason and leave the carcass to actively rot -- and I mean "actively." A nice close up shot of a decomposing buffalo's mouth crawling with maggots. Gag me with a spoon! The ways of the white folks are represented mainly by abandoned farmhouses and an abandoned mine, filled with rusting junk.
It's an odd story. For all the troubles they've been through, neither Agutter nor her brother seems particularly disturbed. After their father eats his gun, there's no reaction to it, and there is only the briefest reference to it late in the story. Luc Roeg asks Agutter why his father killed himself and she brushes it off with, "I don't know." I don't know why he's dead either. I don't know why Gumpilil props himself up in a tree and dies after courting Agutter in this spooky manner. Maybe it was something he ate. If Roeg's view of Western civilization is justified, somebody should have explained to Gumpilil that it's best for him to have nothing to do with any of them, Agutter's definitive nubility notwithstanding. But these two deaths, like many other things in the film, go unexplained, as they might in real life.
There's a tacked-on epilogue with Agutter married but still dreaming of her walkabout. A. E. Houseman's poem makes it all seem wistful and full of contentment, although that's not exactly what the film has shown us. What we've witnessed is a tragedy in slow motion, sometimes languorous. When musing about the largely unexplained and partly accidental character of the narrative, the director had an interesting observation. It's rather like life, isn't it? It has a beginning and an end. "You're born and then you die, and everything in between is an anecdote."
In any case, you are guaranteed to have a hard time shaking this one out of your memory.
It's a simple story on the face of it. A father -- one of those Richard Cory types -- takes his kids (Agutter and Luc Roeg) for a drive into the desert. He parks the car for a picnic in the middle of nowhere and tries to shoot them -- rather a shocking moment since the film hasn't set it up. Failing that, he sets fire to the car and blows out his brains.
The two kids must get home but they go about it in the dumbest way imaginable. Instead of following the car's tire tracks back to a road they take off in a random direction. And, really, since they were driven inland from Sidney (Adelaide in the novel), they ought to head east towards the sea, meaning they should walk towards the rising sun.
But, man, these kids are out of their element. If it weren't for their accidentally running into aboriginal David Gumpilil, they wouldn't get very far. Fortunately he knows how to extract a living from what seems to be a most unpromising environment. He hunts and he gathers, as hunters and gatherers do, and there are some unpleasant scenes of real animals being speared to death. It's like watching a movie in Anthropology 101. Still, Gumpilil kills only to eat, and otherwise lives in harmony with nature.
Roeg's film alas contrasts Gumpilil's cheerful optimism and, finally, his mortal love for Agutter, with the ways of the white folks. They seem uniformly nuts, wasteful, and unfriendly. They shoot and kill buffalo for no evident reason and leave the carcass to actively rot -- and I mean "actively." A nice close up shot of a decomposing buffalo's mouth crawling with maggots. Gag me with a spoon! The ways of the white folks are represented mainly by abandoned farmhouses and an abandoned mine, filled with rusting junk.
It's an odd story. For all the troubles they've been through, neither Agutter nor her brother seems particularly disturbed. After their father eats his gun, there's no reaction to it, and there is only the briefest reference to it late in the story. Luc Roeg asks Agutter why his father killed himself and she brushes it off with, "I don't know." I don't know why he's dead either. I don't know why Gumpilil props himself up in a tree and dies after courting Agutter in this spooky manner. Maybe it was something he ate. If Roeg's view of Western civilization is justified, somebody should have explained to Gumpilil that it's best for him to have nothing to do with any of them, Agutter's definitive nubility notwithstanding. But these two deaths, like many other things in the film, go unexplained, as they might in real life.
There's a tacked-on epilogue with Agutter married but still dreaming of her walkabout. A. E. Houseman's poem makes it all seem wistful and full of contentment, although that's not exactly what the film has shown us. What we've witnessed is a tragedy in slow motion, sometimes languorous. When musing about the largely unexplained and partly accidental character of the narrative, the director had an interesting observation. It's rather like life, isn't it? It has a beginning and an end. "You're born and then you die, and everything in between is an anecdote."
In any case, you are guaranteed to have a hard time shaking this one out of your memory.