1971@50: WALKABOUT

I hate the term overrated. Also, I hate the term pretentious. Both are too often used as a means of creating a kind of pop cultural taboo over something like a movie, a book, or the entire output of an artist. You're meant to shrink from it lest you should be tainted by the pretention spirit and languish with lesioned skin in the shadows of the great mediocrity. These terms get hurled at names like Antonioni, David Lynch, Tracy Emin and a host of others. When they get tossed at Nicholas Roeg, though, things get a touch complex. You are allowed to kind of like everything he did but you need to be quiet about it. That's because of films like Walkabout.

Two uppercrust white kids evade their father's unexplained attempted murder of them (before his own suicide) and have to fend for themselves in the primeval wilderness of an outback that changes its character with almost every scene, now a red desert, now lush grassland. The point is not about how real this is but how the tale is told. The pair of siblings meet up with a young aborigine who proves to be their guide and saviour, providing food and direction through the punishing territory and this itself gets complicated. Beyond that there be spoilers.

The problem is that while the allegorical approach taken by Roeg is clear he also takes pains to give it an apparently realistic setting. There is a lot of violence to native animals in this film. The suggestion is that they are all destined to be food (except for some white hunters seen later) but if you were curious about this movie but dislike any real animal violence you need to be wary.

The trek taken by the trio is where the realism is not meant to be held as a standard. The aboriginal boy's appearance has been heralded in a title card explaining that his walkabout is a rite, part of his passage to adulthood. The Euro kids have no such culture to their predicament which has come from cruelty and violence. We see the girl at the start in a class of what used to be called Speech where blazer school kids learned the Queen's English. Roeg's depiction of it shows a typically alienating routine where the girls are huffing as though learning childbirth but it's just to get them forming their mouths, teeth and tongues correctly for the rain in Spain falling mainly on the plain. The closest it gets to a rite is the implicit suggestion of social status, something bought and not earned. In the First Nations boy's world we find him earning his life with skills and knowledge of nature. Perhaps mindful of the audiences of the time Roeg carefully avoids the suggestion of the boy posing a sexual threat. When sexuality does appear it, too, is framed by ritual.

That scene is one of the few really successful moments in the fable level of the film. There is a great energy in one character and an uncomprehending fear in the other and its conclusion has the brutality of mythology. But it really is one of the few. The reason I find it so difficult to love Roeg's films is not in the audacity of his ideas nor even in how short he falls from them. I don't care if he's pretentious, in other words (probably most of the art I like can be legitimately called pretentious as it boldly goes beyond). 

No, it's that the movies end up being so calculated and stiff in construction that they feel like they've had the warmth squeezed out of them. There is almost no humour ever in a Nicholas Roeg film. I don't mean they need to be laugh riots but without that crucial reach of welcome the symbolism and metaphor always feel academic rather than organic. Images of the rat race in the city are dominated by the sound of the digeridoo. A brick wall is used as a kind of stage curtain to reveal first the urban sprawl and then the outback. The boy's hunting and slaughter of  the animals is intercut with an urban butcher who might never have been to an abbatoir. John Mellion's dad figure falls dead at the start in three or so different angles to put a bit of Eisenstein in there. He later resurrects through some Steenback magic as the shot rolls backwards (along with a water buffalo later). All of this ends up feeling over punched. None of it feels like it has come from the world of the movie.

All this despite the interplay of Jenny Agutter, Luc Roeg and a very young David Gulpilil which is uniformly engaging, all of whom seem to be genuinely moving through their strange new nature for real. I wonder if the Italian research team in the desert with the leering hunks and sexy young meteorologist is meant as a dig at Antonioni. The strings heavy score is John Barry's and swings between sublime esoteric moodiness and supermarket muzak (not intentionally, though). Too much to tell but so little to care about. In the end it's watchable, never boring and occasionally stunning. That's Nick Roeg for you and if anyone tells you how overrated or pretentious he is, return with a smile and find your way to the mini spanakopita plate.