Walkabout

viewed February 25, 2000 on video

For full information about this film, click here

Nicholas Roeg's first solo directing feature is a beautiful and haunting allegory that stands in awe of nature's power over the human race, even as the race unites to conquer it. A well-mannered teenage girl and her little brother find themselves lost in the Australian outback after their father mysteriously sets their car ablaze and kills himself.  They wander in the middle of nowhere for an unspecified length of time, preserving themselves against the elements with a radio, the girl's pronunciation lessons, the boy's toy cars, and a picnic blanket filled with canned food.  As they are about to wither away in the heat, they are found by a young aborigine, wandering through the desert on walkabout, the solo rite of passage for the male aborigine. The young man eventually shows them the way to civilization, but not before we notice mysterious undercurrents of sexuality burgeoning between him and the girl.  What happens between them in the end is a spellbinding tragedy of misunderstanding between male and female, Colonizer and Native.

The film is a forebear to The Piano with their shared concerns about civilization vying against nature, with sexuality being the main source of tension.  Both are heavy in metaphor, but Walkabout seems to be more visually alluring, stated in simpler terms and thus closer to a state of mythic truth. In the end, there is a happy scene that seems to occur only in one of the character's memory, and as such it disappears, leaving the feeling that the human race has evolved to the point where we can hardly understand ourselves in all of our beautiful and strange diversity.

This is listed as one of Roger Ebert's Great Movies.

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