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Films & Filming review
WALKABOUT
- Directed and photographed by Nicolas Roeg.
- Produced by Si Litvonoff.
- Screenplay by Edward Bond.
- From the novel of the same name by James Vance Marshall.
- Editors, Antony Gibbs and Alan Patillo.
- Music, John Barry, Billy Mitchell, Rod Stewart, Warren Marley,
and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
- Designer, Brian Eatwell.
- A Max L Raab/Si Litvonoff production, distributed by 20th Century
Fox.
- Australian. Colour. Cert. AA. 100 mins.
- Girl, JENNY AGUTTER;
- White boy, LUCIEN JOHN;
- Black boy, DAVID GUMPILIL;
- Father, JOHN MEILLON;
- No-hoper, PETER CARVER;
- Husband, JOHN ILLINGSWORTH:
- Australian scientist, BARRY DONNELLY;
- German scientist, NOELENE BROWN;
- Italian Scientist, CARLO MANCHINI.
A delicate allegory taunts the mind. A visual imagination warms the senses
occasionally overheating them as befits the locale of this ambitious and
almost wholly successful movie by Nicholas Roeg. The basis is elementary:
on the one hand urban society with materialistic hangups; on the other
the natural life, forbidding, challenging, free. By implication, the film
seems to suggest that the latter is infinitely preferable. But since this
assumption in itself is hardly encouraging, for any but those who are
inclined to hare off into the wilderness on the slightest pretext, we
can begin to think for ourselves, if we haven't done so already, that
the ideal state of existence lies somewhere between these extremities.
Roeg found his metaphorical locations in Australia. The suave external
modernity of Sydney becomes his typical now-city in a brilliant opening
montage, as the materialist man (John Meillon) walks heedlessly past architectural
graces, and a smooth pan along a wall leads the eye to a displaced landscape,
a vista of the dead-heart country, a symbol of the city-dweller's soul.
Pasolini's wastelands of volcanic ash have not been stronger in their Angst than this.
The man's malaise is evident again as he drinks and glowers in his home-unit:
a place of glass and anonymity, superficially comfortable but too pat.
Brooding, he takes his two children for a drive and a picnic. Time and
geography are disregarded as the allegory becomes more pronounced. By lunchtime they are far away in the emptiness of the desert. The
man, who is evidently a migrant from England, ponders over some typewritten
notes about his mineral holdings, goes out of his mind, attempts to kill
his son and daughter but doesn't succeed, and then sets the automobile
ablaze and commits suicide.
Such is the prelude. Now the girl of fourteen (Jenny Agutter) and the
boy of six (Lucien John) are alone in an uncharitable vastness, where
ants swarm on a slice of the watermelon they brought along for the picnic,
a reptile looms as large as a prehistoric monster before it is placed
in proportion when their feet enter the frame on the initial phases of
a very long trudge, and an abstract beauty wells up from manifestations
of hostile nature. A great yellow sun hovers in the sky, dissolving very
slowly to a rock face on which the children are climbing like insects.
From a transistor radio, a voice with a somewhat American accent is holding
forth about evolution (one of the few moments where the irony is too extravagant)
as the kids plod on. The primordial emphasis grows stronger in the visuals:
one lizard consumes another. Insects buzz loudly in the hot stillness.
The build-up is complete for the entrance of the key figure, young and
black and indigenous, at one with this alien territory, eyes quick, and
impervious to the flies that swarm in his direction. Here is the child
of nature (David Gumpilil) who can help and possibly teach them both—and
all the rest of us as well. Despite a language barrier, he scents distress;
and despite instinctive caution, he is kind. When he slaughters a kangaroo
(and Roeg intercuts contrast-flashes of a butcher's chopper neatly severing
meat in a modern shop), the black youth seems as primitive as the non-human
animals of the desert. But he meets them on virtually equal terms: later
he will weep at the sight of white men with guns, ravaging the wild life
for profit.
During the slow trek back to their own kind, the English kids begin to
develop a bond with the black Australian. The girl is disturbed to find
herself responding to him sexually, while he maintains his cautious politeness,
no doubt because she is strange. He gazes at the white limbs of a tree,
seen by Roeg's camera as erotic female shapes, which might be a rudimentary
notion but is so astutely placed as to radiate the feeling of the youth:
the imagery is true and strong. And, as the journey nears its end, the
atavistic quality blends into a remarkable sequence which begins with
the black body out-stretched upon bleached bones, his face painted in
readiness for a slow and patient dance, a mating ritual to woo the girl
who scarcely understands and is troubled. By now the film has reached
beyond conventional narrative boundaries, making its comparison between
two disparate lifestyles in a concept so beautifully realised that the
dance and its sad conclusion leave dangerously little ground for the story
to come full cycle without surrendering its claim upon us. Nevertheless,
the epilogue is neatly managed. The girl in later life is confined to
the expensive kitchen of a home-unit, identical with the one she left
at the beginning. Her young husband bounds home through the same now-city
that killed her father. And he kisses her and speaks of material progress
at the expense of his fellow men. The animal in man wears a city suit.
The girl's mind finds refuge in a memory placed somewhere between reality
and wishfulness, at a point to which she will never return.
To the spare dialogue of Edward Bond's screenplay (adapted from a James
Vance Marshall novel), music is a valuable addition (most of it by John
Barry, with a useful blast of Stockhausen for good measure) in a soundtrack
as carefully orchestrated as the visuals themselves, which, even in those
infrequent excesses (the last 'vision' is really a touch too much), maintain
the gentle allegory. And this, especially in view of the travelling and
time involved, is pretty remarkable: a feat in terms of continuity. The
editing (Antony Gibbs and Alan Patillo) contributes exactly to the style
that Roeg has evolved and carried through so well. Thoroughgoing materialists,
if they can bring themselves to understand Walkabout, might well
abhor every frame of it, in which case it will have hit the mark. If it
sends them away enraged but thinking deep, this could be a film that plays
its little part in changing the ways of the world.
GORDON GOW
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