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.
Trivia:- The poetry quoted by the narrator at the end of the film is Part 40 of A.E. Housman's 'A Shropshire Lad': Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.
- Jenny Agutter was embarrassed when doing the scene of her swimming naked in the lake, so as many as possible of the crew were sent away. When shooting was done they returned, stripped naked, and went for a swim.
- Due to Jenny Agutter's full-frontal nudity, film originally drew an "R" rating from the MPAA. It was reduced to "PG" on appeal.
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