Walkabout (1971)

Don't Look Now by Nicholas Roeg is one of the movies that has made a deep impression on me and its eerie atmosphere has been haunting me since I watched it. I first watched Walkabout as a teen. 15 years later, I did not remember much of the film, except for the strange feelings it evoked. I didn't remember, or then I didn't understand, anything about the film's exoticism, its at times rather tiring contrast between nature and civilization and its insistent preoccupation with the nude female body. Beyond that, Walkabout has its strong moments of unarticulated dread as well as interpersonal encounters.

The story starts out with two children and their father going out to the outbacks. They get out of the car and instead of a nice picnic out in the wild, the dad starts shooting at his offspring. They run away and the dad kills himself. The film follows the kids as they wander through the barren landscapes. They are dressed like neat school children and their conversations have a strangely detached tone. No trace of civilization is to be seen, except for the radio they are carrying around with them. The viewer loses the track of time. The children find an oasis with some water and one day they meet an aboriginal boy. The boy knows much more about nature than these two children. He hunts, he knows his way about and he knows how to find water. The rest of the film focuses on the communication between these three children. They do not share a language, but they share a life, or rather, they share some moments together.

The film gets rather stereotypical in how it depicts the sexual tensions in the relation between the girl and the boy. The camera ogles the girl's body and we are lead to think that a sexual encounter would somehow be a dangerous infringement on some basic rules. This sense of games is placed among images of snakes, lizards and bugs. It is as if Roeg is trying to show that two of these children can never be fully in tune with nature - only the aborigine can. This seems to be a hugely strange claim to make, especially as the film risks bringing forth the image that aborigines are somehow mythically and mystically close to nature, and that they are, in fact, 'nature'. In the end, Roeg's major message seems to be the futility of hope when it comes to understanding others. We remain captives within our own worlds, he seems to suggest. If the film were less artistically challenging, this pessimism would have bothered me even more.

Nonetheless, the film contains a multitude of truly memorable scenes that are placed somewhere between dream, fantasy and reality. A virtue of the film is how little is explained. Even though there are exoticism at play in how the aborigines are portrayed, the film itself can hardly be charged with romanticizing nature. Yes, it seems to say something about an impossibility to cross the border between civilization and nature, but nature is not represented as a cozy haven of tranquility, at least not only. The film ends on a rather unresolved note that begs a new series of questions, rather than delivering some reassuring answers. Towards the end of the film, there is also an unsettling scene in which the children come across an abandoned mining town that evokes a strong apocalyptic vision of culture as a garbage heap. In scene after scene, Walkabout features commentary on the technological society as a site of alienation, exploitation and decay.

Another reason to watch this movie is its eerie music. The stark images of barren nature are accompanied with children singing an extremely strange little tune.