Walkabout

Plot synopsis:
Somewhere in harbourside Sydney, Australia, a family lives within a high-rise apartment building where the mother is preparing a meal and listening to the radio. Her fourteen year old daughter (Jenny Agutter) and six year old son (Luc Roeg) swim in the building's pool overlooking a view of the ocean while their father (John Meillon), deep in troubled thought, watches them from their balcony.One day, the father takes his children, still in their school uniforms, on a picnic into the Outback. He parks the car and reads while his daughter sets up a blanket with their lunch. Her brother plays nearby with his water gun and toy soldiers. Suddenly, and for reasons unclear to his children, the father announces it is time to go and brandishes a gun, firing several shots at them. The boy thinks it all to be a game but his sister understands the danger and shields her brother as they run from their mad father. She watches in horror as her father returns to the car and sets it on fire before seating himself within and putting a bullet into his head. Quickly, and keeping her brother's eyes averted, the girl retrieves their radio, a scarf, and what food she can carry before setting off into the wilderness with her brother.The siblings walk for hours under the hot sun, calmed by irrelevant radio broadcasts, and walking past a host of wild creatures. Come nightfall, they make a crude camp for themselves, much to the boy's delight. In the morning, the girl leads them up a rocky hillside where she hopes to find some bearings. However, she can see nothing but a broad spanse of wilderness. When they finish their lemonade, the girl opens a can of vegetables from which they drink the juice. Recalling an uncle's story of military training, the girl suggests they eat salt to retain water and surmises to her brother that they may spend some time in the desert. She remains stoic, but wary, while her brother is blissfully unaware of their situation, remaining entertained by the radio and his toys. Eventually, after becoming filthy and tired, they come upon a lone tree standing over a pool of water where parakeets flock and feast on fallen fruit. The boy puts on in his mouth and proclaims that it 'tastes lovely'. They wash in the water and the girl scolds her brother to take care of his clothes so they will last. When he asks if they are lost, the girl replies that they are not, trying to remain chipper. They sleep to the sounds of the radio as night animals stir around them.In the morning, the girl wakes to find that their water hole has dried up and the fruit has either been eaten or spoiled. The girl decides to remain where they are, hoping that the water will return. As they nap in the hot sun, the boy spots an aborigine youth (David Gulpilil) pursuing an animal for food. They make contact and the children attempt to communicate with the aborigine boy. However, he does not understand their language and merely stares at them with curiosity. The girl repeats their need for water but the word is incomprehensible to the aborigine. When her brother mimics drinking, the aborigine understands and shows them how to dig for water using a hollow tube to drink through. Assuming that he will lead them to civilization, the siblings accompany the aborigine, unaware that he is on a 'walkabout', a coming-of-age journey that every male aborigine youth must take alone in order to be initiated as an adult in his tribe.As they travel the Outback, the aborigine kills and harvests food for them, giving them all plenty to eat and drink. The move from the desert to greener pastures and forests where wildlife becomes plentiful. When the boy becomes sunburnt from going shirtless, the aborigine rubs pig fat on his back to alleviate the burn. While communication between them remains limited, the trio share food and play together, though cultural differences are evident; the boy attempts to share his toy soldiers with the aborigine, but he finds no use for them and tosses them aside. Despite their time together, the aborigine and the girl develop a tension, in part due to their sexual maturity. While the girl remains wary and tries to keep her distance, the aborigine develops feelings for her. When he tries to talk to her, she does not understand, though her brother attempts to find meaning using pantomime. The aborigine boy stops near a rock cliff and draws a story on the rock face. The girl follows his lead and draws a house, hoping the boy will understand. He seems to.Aborigine workers and children surround a solitary house and trailer in the Outback, painted white with plaster from the figurines they're making. Their boss, a gruff white male overlooks their progress, berating them at times, while his wistful wife walks the property. She comes upon the aborigine boy and speaks to him but he rebuffs the woman's advances and walks away. The woman spots the children the boy is with but they remain unaware of her presence and follow the aborigine further into the wilds.So near and yet so far away, less than a few miles from the children's location, a group of scientists fiddle with weather balloons, though the men seem more interested in the solitary woman on their team. They look over at her every time she leans and one man goes so far as to eliminate further competition for her affections by letting loose one of their balloons, inciting a short chase by the other men. The balloon drifts away and eventually is caught in brambles and found by the aborigine boy. Tired, the girl asks him when they will reach their destination. Her brother translates the aborigine's signs that they should arrive that day.Later, they come upon a homestead overlooking a field of green and backed by a forest. The girl runs ahead along a picket fence but is upset to find that the home is deserted and crumbling. They set up residence there and the aborigine boy tries to speak to the girl but does not understand her sorrow. He watches her as she tours the home and begins to cry after finding some old photographs. He remains confused but understand when the girl asks for 'water'. Later on, the aborigine shows the boy a paved road near the homestead before going hunting. He chases an animal with his spear but is knocked aside as a truck carrying white men drives past and guns the animal down. The boy watches in silent confusion as the men tote the animal away.He returns to the homestead and ignores the girl's hello. His feelings culminating, he decides to perform a courtship dance for the girl, perhaps knowing that he can never return to his tribe. He paints himself with white clay and puts feathers on his arms and head. However, his dance frightens the girl and she shuts herself inside the house with her brother while he continues to dance outside into the night. Despite his visibly exhaustion, the girl refuses to speak to him. When her brother tells her of the road that he found with the aborigine, the girl decides that they will continue along their journey alone come morning.The next day, they dress fully in their school uniforms and collect their things. The boy looks for the aborigine, who has disappeared, but the girl insists that he went back to his people and that his absence is for the best. Her brother then tells her he tried to offer the aborigine his penknife as a gift, but the boy didn't take it. Puzzled, the girl follows her brother to where the aborigine had propped himself in a hanging position in the low branches of a tree, dead of exhaustion and heartbreak. The girl swats a few ants off the boy's body, looks at him sadly, and then takes her brother to the road. They follow it to a row of buildings near a mine quarry and knock on one of the trailer doors. An older man answers begrudgingly and tells them to leave. When the girl begs for help, he tells them where they can wait for someone to collect them. The siblings walk away from the trailer and its well watered lawn to the old mine where they play together among scrap metal.Years later, a young man returns home where he greets his wife, the girl now grown, and tells her that he's been promoted to a position that will finance a vacation on the Gold Coast. His wife's mind wanders and when he asks her what she's thinking of, she replies, 'nothing'. But we see her visions of years past when she and her brother bathed and played happily, and without trivial needs, in the Outback with their aborigine friend.

Tags: insanity, mystery, storytelling, flashback

Review:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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 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.
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.
A remarkably potent little film about a couple of very proper English kids who get lost in the Australian outback and hitch up with an aborigine boy on his initiation quest (or "walkabout").
According to the trailer in the letterbox edition, Parents' Magazine recommended the film "without reservation" for young and old alike, because it depicts "facts of life."  While that may be true, times have changed, and I can't imagine anyone today describing this subtle and unsettling story as "family fare." Incredibly tame, on its face, by today's standards of sensory overload, its essential world-weariness and maturity is no longer a didactic priority in our age of overconfidence.
Therefore what most vividly stuck in my mind was the lead character played by a beautiful blonde English girl, Jenny Agutter, Specifically the nude scenes of her swimming and washing.On a less superficial level it is a film with a point-something along the lines of the graciousness of Aborigines and their ability to live in harsh surrounds, and the destructive nature of suburban life in a flat in a major city.I think it would be a film, like Jedda, that will always be on reference for the Australian Outback, Aboriginals and the modern society which brought a European civilisation to their land..
industrialization, corruption of a purer way of life, we see all these themes, but it would have been preferable to see it without being visually and aurally clubbed over the head like the poor animals in the outback are.Disregarding that aspect, I quite liked the story of two white children, one very young, the other pubescent (and lingeringly shot), who get stuck in the Outback after their patriarchal and borderline psycho father is blown up.
He didn't disappoint in this film either - he has an incredible presence on screen.This film comments on so many racial and cultural issues in Australia, and in a way that's so subtle that it unnerves you with you knowing why - I haven't read the book its based on, so I can't comment on whether it stems from there.Two English kids (Jenny Agutter and Lucien John) are taken from their comfortable home in what seems to be Sydney (the harbour bridge is visible in one shot) and taken into outback South Australia by their father (John Meillon), and no explanation is made for this.
Directed and photographed by Nicolas Roeg, it tells of an English schoolgirl (Jenny Agutter) and her brother (Lucien John) getting lost in the Australian outback, and encountering an Aborigine (David Gulpilil), who looks after them and ensures their survival.
Her brother sets aside his worldly toys and learns how to gather leaves, as well as pick up some phrases in Aborigine language so as to be able to communicate successfully.Roeg sets this coming-of-age story within the larger theme of the destruction of the natural landscape by humankind.
The film reminded me many times of "The Emerald Forest" where the little boy disappeared into the jungle and was found by Indians who were silently watching the road being built only steps away from the heavy construction equipment, and yet so very far.This film is the best Australian wilderness film since "Jedda" a 1950s film about the attempts of a white couple to raise an aboriginal child in a white man's world..
Cinematographer Nicolas Roeg turned first-time director here with a highly visceral and thought-provoking film about two Australian city children stranded in the hot, dusty Outback.
The story exposition is rather muffled, and the finale is pretentious, but Jenny Agutter certainly gives the film a boost (her beauty is astonishing, especially in a memorable nude swimming scene).
Apparently I watched this movie with a distinct disadvantage: I wasn't stoned.I can come up with plenty of adjectives to explain my dislike for it: incoherent, random, plot less, exploitative, amateurish.I have questions too:How did the car get to what looks like outback Northern Territory or Western Australia from Sydney with the lunch still packed and fresh and the two children still dressed in pristine school uniforms.Why are the children dressed in pristine school uniforms when they've accompanied weird old' dad to the outback??Why are we okay with the child nudity and sexual content in this film?
In Australia (where the movie takes place), when a male Aborigine turns 16 he is sent out on the land to survive by himself.When I looked at the cover art of the DVD and heard David Gordon Green mention this film on an episode of Charlie Rose, I immediately started imagining what the movie would be like.
From here, the film gets more mystical: the children come across a tree and water site, and the boy eats a berry from the tree, saying, "Tastes like meat." Roeg puts us in an almost surreal, dreamlike state, and I found myself questioning almost everything I was seeing.
Roeg is interested in his images and his quirks, like when the boy tells the Aborigine a story, and Roeg decides to edit that sequence by wiping away with a turning page from a book.I couldn't stand seeing the animals being killed and beaten for the purposes of a movie, no matter how good.
Another similarity is the buzzing insects highlighted a few times in the film that sound like the horrible noise that comes with the appearance of the monolith in "2001." Roeg's direction makes the early part of the movie fascinating -- I had no idea where he was going.
I get it!!" And Roeg is the king of mixed signals (not in a good way, either), as in one scene we get shot after shot of the aborigine teen slaying animals intercut with full frontal nude shots of sixteen-year old Jenny swimming around while muzak plays (???) That nonsense of showing beauty/slaughter intercut was old by 1969, so Roeg was not doing anything new.
While the narrative was enough to keep me watching, this message got a bit heavy after a short time.I stayed watching to see what happened to the boy and girl, but the film kept labouring the point about nature/aborigine good, industrialisation/white men bad.
This movie, simply put, is definitely a product of the 70s.It details, roughly, the story of a young girl and her brother who, after a disturbing and tragic event of which I will not spoil, find themselves alone in Australian wilderness, having to survive against all the relative dangers that come with being in such a predicament.
The movie, however full of natural dangers, however, does not focus so much upon the survivalism or even will to live so much as upon a coming-of-age involving a very dangerous and empty world.What makes it really distinct is not only said disregard for the civilities of survival-based exposition and important dialog, but the structuring of the film around three general editing devices that pull out a self-consciously artistic sense of malaise: jump cuts, graphic matches, and montage editing.
Abandoned in the Australian Outback, a fourteen year old girl and her little brother stagger around until they are saved by an Aborigine boy on his six month walkabout.
His concentration on this aspect though, causes big cracks to appear in other areas of the film which ultimately are serious enough to undermine all the cinematic beauty and force 'Walkabout' into the category of grand failure.Jenny Agutter plays a teenage schoolgirl who is left to fend for herself and her young brother when their father cracks up and kills himself after driving them out for a desert picnic.
Once the kids set off on their journey through the Australian outback, however, then things start to gain some momentum, with photography that reminds one of the desert scene in The Good the Bad and the Ugly (or, for that matter, Lawrence of Arabia, which Roeg was an photographer on).Once finding an oasis, and finding it drying out, the kids look like they're in trouble.
The story is simple, when a brother and sister find themselves stranded in the Outback of Austtralia, they find leadership, and maybe more, from a bushman who is doing a walkabout to prove his manhood.As I said, this film has a whole pile of double meanings, and the film sort of grips you from the start with it's Koyaanisiqatsi like urban-images (of course, that film didn't come out til much later) and then suddenly we're transported into the desert to meet our 2 characters, who's Dad, shall we say, makes a very curious decision.
I'm not too sure what kind of research Roeg did for this film, but you feel you're in some sort of mind-warping travelogue here, with visions of animals, the climate and the weather of the outback.Simply stunning.I'm not going to say much about the story, but there's a whole lot of interesting foreshadowing going on, especially with the father character.
Again, this is a nice movie that will make you THINK.The cast here is remarkable, Jenny Agutter shows what a real amazing actress she turned out to be (She was in American Werewolf In London and Saturn's Run among other things) and her brother is played by the director's own son, Lucien, who shows a natural youth curiosity of the things around him, and his performance hardly see,s forced at all.Now, much has been said about the rampant nudity and violence (which aren't connected) in the film.
Father drives with his daughter (Jenny Agutter) and son (Luc Roeg) to Australian outback.The kids think they're going to have a nice picnic at the desert until their father takes the gun out and starts shooting at them.He misses them but kills himself and sets the car on fire.After that the kids try to find back to civilization and survive in the desert.They run into an Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) who is hunting animals in the desert.It is a tradition of Aboriginals to send a 16 years old boy out to the desert and he has to try to survive in the wild nature for months.That's where the title Walkabout comes from.Walkabout from 1971 is great Nicolas Roeg film.This British movie is much more than just an adventure drama.There are many levels in this movie.There is also outstanding cast.Jenny Agutter is amazing as the teen girl and Luc Roeg does superb job as her little brother.It is very interesting to watch these two city kids and the Aboriginal boy who is living in the desert far away from civilization contact with each other.They don't speak the same language but they understand each other some how.
This isn't a walkabout at all!Although never fully mentioned the walkabout refers to a rite-of-passage for young Aborigines who must survive on their own in the Outback for a number of months, hunting for food, finding water and generally being able to survive the harsh & extreme conditions before they are truly marked as an Aboriginal Adult.Secondly, although the main visible theme of the film is one of survival for all three teenagers it hides various secret agendas that you don't initially think about unless you see the film again.The opening scenes for example show us that for all the great progress civilization & technology has provided the "cultured" western world with, we are now no more than human termites, living in high rise buildings, living our humdrum clockwise lives; where everything is done for us by other human "termites" at our behest.
After sending out so many subtle metaphors throughout the movie, Roeg throws it all away in a couple of minutes dumbing-down at the end.However, the film generally is a true masterpiece of different cultures, worlds, customs & human needs.
But in this film the principals are on the screen almost all the time, and no one who sees it is likely to forget these characters: Jenny Agutter as a properly-raised schoolgirl who can't leave the propriety of "civilized" behavior behind even in the primeval environment she finds herself in; Lucien John (Luc Roeg) as her younger brother who demonstrates a child's extraordinary capacity to adapt to situations that older persons would find almost impossible to deal with; and David Gulpilil as the Aborigine youth who finds them on his "walkabout" and provides a link to a primitive past that is still a part of all people..
The low point is probably the very end, where a narrator appears out of nowhere to tell us what a character is feeling when it could hardly have been more obvious - by reciting poetry.Still, if you can shoulder Roeg's artiness there's a lovely story about an English teenaged girl and an aboriginal teenaged boy.
Walkabout (1971) *** 1/2 (out of 4) A girl (Jenny Agutter) and her young brother (Luc Roeg) find themselves in the Australian outback trying to survive after being left out there.
To say that "Walkabout" is simply "about" communication, or "about" cultural differences, or survival, or the relationship between Man and Nature, or the clash of urban civilisations with other, older ways of life would be to oversimplify the film, even though it is "about" all those things and others.
I was so young and dumb, I was completely oblivious to the fact that I had just watched scores of beautiful animals being slaughtered for the sake of a movie.Then fast forward 46 years, and I get curious to see the film again, because I read all the compliments here about it, and I wanted to see why.I certainly have no problems with nudity, but this director used it in poor taste, especially considering the implied age of the the lead actress.On my second viewing via DVD, I especially didn't like the super close ups of the breasts of the Aborigines women as they were inspecting the wreckage of a burned out automobile near the beginning.
The movie was directed by Nicolas Roeg, which explains the strange violent elements, but there is also a delicacy here in the desert images that is very different from anything in films like The Man Who Fell to Earth or Performance..
I would certainly number amongst them the clash between civilisation and primitivism, the loss of innocence, a young girl's sexual awareness (personified in Jenny Agutter's journey to experience, partly responding to the different strains of nature bursting out all around her and brought to a head in the person of the young Aborigine, whose thwarted fertility dance to her only frightens her and leads him to the film's second shocking suicide) and as someone adroitly put it, a wonderful travelogue of the Australian outback, which we get to see in all its wild, strange beauty at different times and from a host of different perspectives.The acting by the three children is remarkable.
i saw this movie like years ago and i can still remember this film cause of the beauty of Jenny and the amazing story....