Walkabout (1971)
Drama

The Criterion Collection

Tagline: The Aborgine and the girl 30,000 years apart ...together.
Tagline: Just about the most different film you'll ever see

Nicolas Roeg's mystical masterpiece chronicles the physical, spiritual, and emotional journey of a sister and brother abandoned in the harsh Australian outback. Joining an Aborigine boy on his walkabout--a tribal initiation into manhood--these modern children pass from innocence into experience as they are thrust from the comforts of civilization into the savagery of the natural world.

Storyline: A privileged British family consisting of a mother, a geologist father and an adolescent daughter and son, live in Sydney, Australia. Out of circumstance, the siblings, not knowing exactly where they are, get stranded in the Outback by themselves while on a picnic. They only have with them the clothes on their backs - their school uniforms - some meagre rations of nonperishable food, a battery-powered transistor radio, the son's satchel primarily containing his toys, and a small piece of cloth they used as their picnic drop-cloth. While they walk through the Outback, sometimes looking as though near death, they come across an Australian boy who is on his walkabout, a rite of passage into manhood where he spends months on end on his own living off the land. Their largest problem is not being able to verbally communicate. The boy does help them to survive, but doesn't understand their need to return to civilization, which may or may not happen based on what the Australian boy ends up ... Written by Huggo

User Comment: Author: Hermit C-2 from Marietta, GA, USA, 2 January 2000 • Nicholas Roeg's 'Walkabout' is a unique and remarkable film. Stunningly photographed (by the director himself), it presents the greatest contrast I've ever seen between Humankind and Nature. The point has been made that the film bears some resemblance to '2001: A Space Odyssey,' and as odd as that may sound, it's a valid comparison. Instead of two insignificant men hurled into the immense void of space, here we have a teenaged girl and her younger brother lost in the vast emptiness of the Australian Outback. Dialog is spare in both films, and secondary to understanding its meaning. And the meaning in both films is not handed to us on a platter, so that the viewer must work to draw his or her conclusions, a task that proves to be eminently worthwhile.

As was the case with '2001,' the actors are subservient to Roeg's overall vision, which is the star here. 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.

Summary: Unique, thought-provoking and visually stunning.

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