Nicolas Roeg's "Walkabout" seems like an extraordinarily raw survival adventure at first glance, what with the tale of two youngsters duking it out in the Australian outback with only an Aborigine lad separated by his tribe as their only hope. What it fully explores, what resolutions it conjures up – I can only explain briefly here as I am still pondering myself. Had Hollywood made this film they would have transformed it into an overly simplistic and pretentious tale that ends with both sides learning from one another – the children learning about nature and its 'holiness', and the indigenous lad picking up a few modern skills or two, and of course he and the girl get together. This is not that movie.
I've been away from home for about two years now, studying abroad. I wouldn't consider myself an actively social person – not in the slightest. During my time abroad I have met countless people – all of them interesting, some of them I have trouble communicating at first. It isn't just that I find most of these situations awkward – there are some beliefs and ways of people that I simply cannot comprehend about them – and for that matter, I wouldn't blame them for feeling the same way towards me and others too. We all have our own opinions, thoughts, beliefs, dreams, hopes – we all pick different variations towards those. If we were to meet a person who is willing enough to understand us without compromising their own beliefs, then we are blessed. "Walkabout" is about the failure of this communication system. None of these characters are able to fully understand one another, even though two of them are brother and sister. At the end of the movie all three are ultimately lost, one way or another, and will never return to the way things were.
How they get lost is presented in a series of thought-provoking thematic explorations Roeg and his writer Edward Bond concocted (in a mere 14 pages reportedly), basing off a novel by James Vance Marshall. The two children are abandoned in the Outback by their suicidal father, having been corrupted by and finally given up on modern civilization. Now as nature seeks to claim these unprepared youths, a lone Aborigine male who happens to be wandering the wilderness stumbles upon them.
This boy sees them and is intrigued, and they as well. The little boy imitates the young man in certain survival skills – the girl does not communicate and is aloof with her own thoughts, naively unaware of her blooming sexuality that is now captivating the young man, and perhaps her father too, in the wrong way. The failure of communication becomes complete when the girl rejects the boy flatly as he performs a mating ritual in front of her, in a desperate act to charm her.
A quick internet search also reveals the meaning of the title 'walkabout' – a rite of passage where adolescent Aborigines go on a journey into the wild for about half a year in order to attain a certain level of spirituality. The film examines this by asking whether such enlightenment can be destroyed by the presence of a toxic communication. The boy and girl were raised by civilization, the young man by nature. Both clash, both fail to understand each other, and ultimately both end up getting more lost than before, because once they were lost in a sea of ignorance and presumptions, now they are forever lost in uncertainty and wonder, permanently changed, never being able to return to the way things were – haunted by the very idea that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
In between the main plot we have side-views of how mankind has completely lost their touch with nature – one shows a research team who loses a weather balloon, another shows a plantation. Roeg's cinema- verite camera makes these scenes and people in it feel pessimistic and unwholesome – I believe that was on purpose and helped prove the point that the future has overwhelmed the past and left their people confused and lost. One of the plantation workers even sees the young indigenous man, but he does not respond. The film wisely refuses to answer the question 'why did he do that?'
Roeg was a cinematographer before he made this film, and his unique cinema-verite style gives the wilderness scenes a raw edge that shows off the Outback as a place of unforced beauty. There are random shots of animals in the outback, none of them taken in a cutesy-manner, and shows them as graphically nature would – survival of the fittest. There are some brilliant sequences where Roeg and his editor Antony Gibbs juxtapose the hunting and slaughter sequences with random shots of a butcher simultaneously chopping meat. Times have changed but some things stay the same, even if the tools are different.
Roeg's film is profoundly beautiful, unmatched by many, but also deeply pessimistic. It is a tale of losing yourself into nature, but not one where the outcome is positive. The stakes are much higher than a matter of life and death. It's about living and wondering, whether we can truly understand what it feels to live in an environment where nothing makes sense to us, and can transform us in ways that makes us fail to appreciate what we have left. A brilliant thought, yes, but very, very depressing for the lonely and misunderstood.
I've been away from home for about two years now, studying abroad. I wouldn't consider myself an actively social person – not in the slightest. During my time abroad I have met countless people – all of them interesting, some of them I have trouble communicating at first. It isn't just that I find most of these situations awkward – there are some beliefs and ways of people that I simply cannot comprehend about them – and for that matter, I wouldn't blame them for feeling the same way towards me and others too. We all have our own opinions, thoughts, beliefs, dreams, hopes – we all pick different variations towards those. If we were to meet a person who is willing enough to understand us without compromising their own beliefs, then we are blessed. "Walkabout" is about the failure of this communication system. None of these characters are able to fully understand one another, even though two of them are brother and sister. At the end of the movie all three are ultimately lost, one way or another, and will never return to the way things were.
How they get lost is presented in a series of thought-provoking thematic explorations Roeg and his writer Edward Bond concocted (in a mere 14 pages reportedly), basing off a novel by James Vance Marshall. The two children are abandoned in the Outback by their suicidal father, having been corrupted by and finally given up on modern civilization. Now as nature seeks to claim these unprepared youths, a lone Aborigine male who happens to be wandering the wilderness stumbles upon them.
This boy sees them and is intrigued, and they as well. The little boy imitates the young man in certain survival skills – the girl does not communicate and is aloof with her own thoughts, naively unaware of her blooming sexuality that is now captivating the young man, and perhaps her father too, in the wrong way. The failure of communication becomes complete when the girl rejects the boy flatly as he performs a mating ritual in front of her, in a desperate act to charm her.
A quick internet search also reveals the meaning of the title 'walkabout' – a rite of passage where adolescent Aborigines go on a journey into the wild for about half a year in order to attain a certain level of spirituality. The film examines this by asking whether such enlightenment can be destroyed by the presence of a toxic communication. The boy and girl were raised by civilization, the young man by nature. Both clash, both fail to understand each other, and ultimately both end up getting more lost than before, because once they were lost in a sea of ignorance and presumptions, now they are forever lost in uncertainty and wonder, permanently changed, never being able to return to the way things were – haunted by the very idea that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.
In between the main plot we have side-views of how mankind has completely lost their touch with nature – one shows a research team who loses a weather balloon, another shows a plantation. Roeg's cinema- verite camera makes these scenes and people in it feel pessimistic and unwholesome – I believe that was on purpose and helped prove the point that the future has overwhelmed the past and left their people confused and lost. One of the plantation workers even sees the young indigenous man, but he does not respond. The film wisely refuses to answer the question 'why did he do that?'
Roeg was a cinematographer before he made this film, and his unique cinema-verite style gives the wilderness scenes a raw edge that shows off the Outback as a place of unforced beauty. There are random shots of animals in the outback, none of them taken in a cutesy-manner, and shows them as graphically nature would – survival of the fittest. There are some brilliant sequences where Roeg and his editor Antony Gibbs juxtapose the hunting and slaughter sequences with random shots of a butcher simultaneously chopping meat. Times have changed but some things stay the same, even if the tools are different.
Roeg's film is profoundly beautiful, unmatched by many, but also deeply pessimistic. It is a tale of losing yourself into nature, but not one where the outcome is positive. The stakes are much higher than a matter of life and death. It's about living and wondering, whether we can truly understand what it feels to live in an environment where nothing makes sense to us, and can transform us in ways that makes us fail to appreciate what we have left. A brilliant thought, yes, but very, very depressing for the lonely and misunderstood.