A Sydney family drives with their car to the Australian outback. The father sets the car on fire and committs suicide by shooting himself. The kids, a 16-year old girl and a 6-year old boy, have to survive by themselves. They find an oasis with water and a fruit tree in the desert, and encounter an Aboriginal 16-year old guy who helps them survive. They travel by foot through the forest. In an abandoned house, the girl finds photos of a family. Outside, the Aboriginal guy starts a mating dance, but the girl is scared and hides in the house. The Aboriginal guy committs suicide by hanging himself. The girl and the boy reach a town and are saved. Years later, the girl is in a Sydney apartment with her husband.
Included in Roger Ebert’s list of Great Movies, Nicolas Roeg’s “Walkabout” is a strange and hermetic allegory about the relationship between civilized humans and raw nature (both outside and hiding inside of them). It unravels almost as a darker version of “The Wizard of Oz”, the latter depicting Dorothy bored with her daily life routine and traveling to an adventure, only to return and in the end conclude that there is no place like home. Similarly, “Walkabout” could be interpreted as the teenage heroine being bored with her life in urban Sydney, only to be thrown into a survival adventure in the Australian outback, but not enough information is given since the movie has no classic three-act structure nor a clear narrative, and is instead a meditative experience that addresses the subconscious. It refuses to depict nature as something heavenly or idealistic: while the urban life is presented as dull, sterile and under order, the wildlife is alive, full of energy, but also raw, crude and vile, without order, evident in several scenes of the Aboriginal hunting and killing kangaroos and lizards to survive.
The girl and her brother are symbols for modern humans who lost touch with nature. She cannot understand why her father would commit suicide, nor why the Aboriginal guy would start a mating dance. Wild instincts just happen in nature, they lurk inside, and appear randomly without asking. Their journey to nature is thus a journey to the roots of life and emotions which they cannot understand anymore, having been alienated from them. As the sole title already implies, the Aboriginal tradition of a 16-year old sent to the wilderness to survive as a rite of passage, “Walkabout” is also an allegory of growing up: the girl discovers the real harsh world, full of cruelty and indifference towards the weak, and becomes a grown up in the process. Roeg does not reach the level of sheer enchantment of nature obtained by Weerasethakul's similar "Tropical Malady", but he is able to create strange images that conjure up that feeling of adolescents going through growing up, both the bad and the good parts that go along with it. As the ending implies, wildlife and urban life cannot mix. While for the girl the tresspassing into nature is tolerable, because she does not have a strong emotional side anymore, for the Aboriginal guy coming in contact with such indifference is fatal, since he cannot fathom the apathy. The image of the three of them swimming naked in a lake is thus the only moment where they find a common ground, since they are otherwise worlds apart.
Grade:+++
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