Brutal. Pitiless. Cruel. Unforgiving. Violent. Savage.
Tender. Enchanting. Mesmerizing. Lush. Hopeful.
These are just some of the emotions and impressions watching this film triggered.
Being a huge Nicolas Roeg fan (Performance, Don’t Look Now, Fahrenheit 451) in all his kaleidoscopic contributions to cinema (director, cinematographer) I’m practically flagellating myself that it took so long to finally get around to watching Walkabout, to the point I must ruefully confess that I’ve robbed myself of his greatest achievement for the better part of a lifetime. It even surpasses my perennial Roeg favorite and guilty pleasure Don’t Look Now (which is still a sleep-with-the-lights-on horror classic). And with yet another haunting score by the evergreen John Barry it lacks nothing.
Walkabout though is sui generis: it broke the mold the minute it hit the screens in 1970; there’s nothing in cinema to compare to it. Even absent all those film school college professors insisting “movies are art”, this is an aural, visual, deeply felt meditation on the collision of the natural world vs. civilization, progress vs. wilderness, innocence vs. experience, life and death. And simply stunning to watch as the story unfolds. Jenny Agutter is at her eternally enchanting, intriguing best as The Girl; Roeg’s own son Luc amuses as her impish, mischievous little brother (known to us only as the White Boy) and; of course, David Gulpilil as the Black Boy.
Against a stunning backdrop of the Australian outback, the Aborgines’ tolerance and innate desire for peaceful coexistence, contrast devastatingly with the destruction wrought by the supposedly civilized world of the Aussie poachers and industrialists busy raping the landscape, purging it of the fauna the Aborigines depend on to survive. Roeg makes a powerful statement for the White Man as the worst predator of all.
A stone masterpiece.