Review of Walkabout (1971) by Hunter D — 14 Jan 2011

Nicolas Roeg is at his best when he puts damaged characters in alien settings, whether its Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie's grieving pathos in Venice in DON'T LOOK NOW, or David Bowie's stranger-in-a-strange-land presence in THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH.

WALKABOUT is about a pair of kids who find themselves stranded in the Australian Outback after a bizarre tragedy. Wandering miserable and towards inevitable doom in the desert, they come across and Aboriginal youth on a walkabout who helps them to survive, despite their inability to properly communicate with each other.

Roeg's ever-hallucinatory direction makes this trip through the outback an experience more than a story, which lends itself to great cinema, John Barry's beautiful score only adding to heat-induced beauty.

The subtext beneath this sparsely-worded tale is even more profound, as it seems to be more about the inherent lack of understanding and miscommunication between cultures more than anything, as the Australian setting with an Aboriginal lead might suggest.

Roeg's talent is making experiences that are purely cinematic, WALKABOUT is probably the most incredibly vision he's captured.