Film
Cinema Rediscovered: Walkabout
- Director
- Nic Roeg
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 100 mins
For reasons that are never explained, an English businessman blows his brains out while on a picnic in the Australian outback, leaving his two children to fend for themselves. Fourteen-year-old Jenny Agutter immediately takes command, leading her six-year-old brother Lucien John into the desert. “Do you know where we’re going?” he asks. “Of course,” she replies. Soon they’re lost in a hostile environment filled with all kinds of slithery, scuttly and creepy-crawly things, and seem certain to die of thirst when an aborigine boy (David Gulpilil) appears on the horizon. He’s embarking on a tribal coming-of-age ritual, the eponymous Walkabout, which requires him to survive alone in the outback. Jenny just talks at him in typical haughty English schoolgirl style, but young Lucien manages to forge some genuine communication using crude sign language as the aborigine leads them through the desert, slaughtering much of its wildlife along the way.
Arguably Nic Roeg’s finest achievement, this haunting, visionary and virtually wordless tale charts an ultimately tragic culture clash overlain with an unlaboured exploration of adolescent sexuality. It’s superbly photographed by Roeg himself, who later added an additional scene which reveals that the aborigine boy not only understood English all along but also led the children away from ‘civilisation’ rather than towards it.
It’s back on screen as part of Cinema Rediscovered‘s very welcome The Balance of Things: the Cinematic Imagination of Nic Roeg strand.
Our newsletters emailed directly to you
