Review of Walkabout (1971) by Ryan M — 22 Jan 2009

A hot nightmare.

When rewatching this movie I was struck by how much Roeg flirts with the avant-garde (though I guess if I'd seen 'Performance' beforehand I wouldn't have been as surprised). The "lost in the desert" plot provides for ample room in the narrative for thoughtful, poetic play with form, such that what few advances actually occur in the story sometimes register as excuses for keeping the movie out of the 100% non-narrative zone. As the flixster synopsis kind of indicates, it's a haunting tale of the ancient meeting the modern. This dynamic is explored to best effect in the relationship between the girl and the aborigine (unnerving sexual overtones and all), but you also get a more stylized, allegorical take on it in the frame story and the off-putting narrative interruption that happens when the audience meets that horny crew with the weather balloons midway through the film. There are some important and sensitively-rendered suggestions in this film about western civilization, consumerism, and aborigine culture (caught here in the crosshairs of the former)... Of course it's also just a plain visual delight, what with all of the desert and wildlife imagery, and it's got a surprisingly tragic anti-climax. What's probably most valuable in this film is its resevoirs of ambiguity; there are major questions of motivation, tone, and politics that kind of anticipate some of Fassbinder's late-70's "rancid melodramas" in their refusal to intrude on the movie too much beyond obliquely suggesting their existence, like deep pockets. For some reason I see that tentative Fassbinder parallel, and it helps that I'm pretty fond of films that manage to load up on latent content while maintaining a comparably undisturbed surface (and the surface isn't totally undisturbed here, it's got to be said). Roeg made a really bold film here that forces viewers to step out of their comfort zones and get busy thinking.