I had to abandon this reviewing of "A Man Called Horse" because it was after 3 a.m., but I'd never seen "Walkabout" before.
What a weird movie "Walkabout" is!
At the start of the movie, the teenage girl shows astonishing self-assurance and aplomb when her father shoots at her and her brother during a picnic in a desolate area somewhere on the edge of the Australian Outback. Then her father sets the car on fire and commits suicide.
The girl reacts in a common-sense, amazingly-level-headed way. She hides her brother from both the bullets and the regrettable news of their father's demise. Just another daily challenge, apparently: something on the order of learning to pronounce French vowels properly. (Apparently teenage girls have to remain alert and adaptable and react to these kinds of events all the time. Maybe they do!) Then, instead of retracing their path back to civilization, she simply takes her brother and walks straight into the Australian Outback.
So weird! That Australian Outback is no joke. I felt a dread in its close proximity. Like all deserts, it can be nice at the proper time and season. Still, it's pretty simple to die a horrible death out in the emptiness, especially when no one knows you are there. But she is a Pomme for sure - stiff upper lip, and all - and just goes.
I liked the scene where a wombat sits beside them for awhile while they sleep. A lot worse out there! I know if I was sleeping out there in the boonies it wouldn't be no wombat checking on me in the dark. More like a dingo.
And all the innocent Outback sexiness too!
The oddity of the introduction captured my interest. It's one of the strangest movie intros ever! The movie had beautiful cinematography, but was weird and clunky, in that weird, didactic, counter-culture-influenced way we all came to dislike in the early 1970's. Like that weird Billy Jack II movie, where, in order to reveal the corruption at the heart of Wall Street to schoolchildren, it seemed fitting to move to the Hopi Reservation of NE Arizona. Like anyone there understood the sordid details of Wall Street bond trading.
What does Roger Ebert think about "Walkabout"?:
Now the girl and boy face destruction at the hands of nature. They have the clothes they are wearing, a battery-operated radio, and whatever food and drink is in the picnic hamper. They wander the outback for a number of days (the film is always vague about time), and stumble upon an oasis with a pool of muddy water. Here they drink and splash and sleep, and in the morning the pool is dry. At about this time they realize that a solemn young aborigine (David Gulpilil) is regarding them.
...There is an unmistakable sexual undercurrent: Both teenagers are in the first years of heightened sexual awareness. The girl still wears a school uniform that the camera regards with subtle suggestiveness. (An ambiguous earlier shot suggests that the father has an unwholesome awareness of his daughter's body.) The restored footage includes a sequence showing the girl swimming naked in a pool, and scenes of the aborigine indicate he is displaying his manliness for her to appreciate.
...In "Walkabout," the crucial detail is that the two teenagers can never find a way to communicate, not even by using sign language. Partly this is because the girl feels no need to do so: Throughout the film she remains implacably middle-class and conventional, and she regards the aborigine as more of a curiosity and convenience than a fellow spirit. Because not enough information is given, we cannot attribute her attitude to racism or cultural bias, but certainly it reveals a vast lack of curiosity. And the aborigine, for his part, lacks the imagination to press his case--his sexual desires--in any terms other than the rituals of his people. When that fails, he is finished, and in despair.
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