Walkabout

 

WALKABOUT
Director ~ Nicolas Roeg
Writers ~ Edward Bond, Donald G. Payne, Nicolas Roeg
1971, United Kingdom-Australia-United States
Stars ~ Jenny Agutter, David Gulpilil, Luc Roeg

Nicolas Roeg’s first film ‘Performance’ was directed with Donald Cammell, but he was an established cinematographer beforehand (‘Fahrenheit 451’ and, notably, ‘The Masque of the Red Death’). Both Roeg and Cammel went on to exhibit exemplary powers and skill with editing, although only the former crossed over. Roeg carried this on with a succession of classics from ‘Walkabout’, his debut as a solo director, ‘Don’t Look Now’, ‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’ and ‘Bad Timing’: a stunning run. Even later, lesser films such as ‘Eureka’, ‘Insignificance’, ‘Track 29’ and ‘The Witches’ had a lot to offer with his oddball sensibility.

The novel ‘Walkabout’ by James Vance Marshall, published in 1959 originally as ‘The Children’, is a slender affair with a slim story and a travelogue sensibility, showcasing indigenous tricks of survival, the outback scenery and wildlife. James Vance Marshll was a pseudonym for Donald G. Payne, the former being a man who lived in the outback that Payne knew.  The plot: two American children – a young American boy and his adolescent sister – are the sole survivors of a plane crash in the outback and only survive by stumbling upon an Aboriginal youth on “walkabout”, the indigenous rite-of-passage ritual of survival in Australia’s unforgiving wild. The culture clash is both sweet and ultimately tragic and Marshall leaves much unspoken.

Roeg’s ‘Walkabout’ announces his fierce translation of a young adult novel with shock tactics, unpredictable yet fluid cross-cutting editing that moves across time, memory, space and place, held together with the drift of John Barry’s luscious score and reaching a replication of experience rarely achieved in film. Certainly, it does not feel like a children’s benign odyssey anymore, however much the book has been marketed as such. It does this by marooning the children not with a plane crash, but their father’s breakdown (presumably caused by the modern world), murder attempt and suicide. This is a smart narrative change, saving budget but also announces a world of danger and unanswered questions. Your class privilege won’t save you, is not even a safe place ~ and in this adaptation, it is a particular English class privilege.

Like the prose, Roeg’s vision never loses sight of the wildlife simply carrying on while these two alien interlopers of civilisation try to survive. There are many startling shots of scenery and wildlife throughout the film: with a tiny crew of six people, Roeg created a phantasmagoria of improvised beauty and brutality. Always, his editing conveys layers that never lose sight of a bigger picture: they sleep and the dissolves convey their dreaming; as they wrestle with what to do next, the radio talks of mankind’s evolution to a “perpetual succession of comfortable shopkeepers”; or the sun and moon sounding like radio transmitters, or collecting memories on the airwaves. The adage goes that if you don’t notice the editing then the editor is doing their job, but with Roeg the editing is a character, acting like an omnipotent observer, like the universe or fate or Greek Gods playing around with the protagonists. Always a wider and comparative view is communicated: when the white kids are playing in a tree, it is juxtaposed with Aboriginals playing with the burn-out husk of the car; carving up a wallaby is intercut with a butcher’s shop. James Barry’s lush score and the sound design are integral to this, even lapsing into diegetic pop at moments (there is almost always the radio as a symbol of society broadcasting both its inanities, white culture and music). 

 

Roeg had apparently planned to adapt this book for years, for so long that he had co-directed ‘Performance’, his eldest son had grown too old for the part that his youngest took and Agutter had grown a few years into the much more suitable sixteen-seventeen. Agutter’s cut-glass Englishness and professionalism is perfect for a girl that can’t quite adapt from her bubble of civilisation, berating her younger brother for not caring for his uniform in perilous conditions, who thinks that the indigenous boy should know what English if she just talks more forcefully. Hers is a cultural superiority that cannot see or break out of its narrow-mindedness and her persistence in keeping a stiff upper lip are alternately heroic and annoying. She is almost the antagonist in her stubborn resolve not to integrate. Young Luc’s young performance is all young roughness, and it cannot be understated how effective his natural disarming nature is. Gulpilil’s natural grace and openness is warm and fascinating. These make for contrasting yet complimentary performances.

Agutter speaks fondly of David Gulpilil, who obviously made a strong impression on her, and warmly of Roeg. Gulpilil – whose name is misspelt as Gumpilil in the credits – went on to have an acting career for the rest of his life. Lucian Roeg (credited as Lucien John for the film) also speaks of the filming as a fondly remembered time with his whole family. He went on to be a producer ofmany noteworthy indie films (including for the Tom Waits live film ‘Big Time’) but has no further acting credits.

In the book, the white foreigners bring germs and a lack of understanding that brings about the death of the Aboriginal boy; it is his nakedness that the girl can’t get over; indeed, nudity itself proves almost insurmountable for her. In the film it is more sexual awakening mixed with this lack and fear of understanding. The film conveys sexual tension through suggestive close-ups and glances. She becomes increasingly frustrating in her boneheaded adherence to civilisation, although this surely stems also from fear.

At one point, the girl assumes that they are the first white people the youth has seen, but Roeg also shows how busy things are as the children roam oblivious. There are also weather balloons, hunting and what appears to be the exploitation of the locals. There is a great sadness when the youth becomes serious with his advances rejected by the girl who doesn’t understand, and a realisation that this civilisation that is portrayed as unfriendly and crude will reject and destroy his culture. But this is not to say the film is sentimental about the opposing Aborigine culture, making killing as much an ancestral artform, hanging corpses in trees, surrounded by flies. He also does not possess the imagination to think beyond his culture to communicate more than survival tips. The girl realises too late the Eden she experienced. These are the tragedy.

‘Walkabout’ may possess a simple and slender premise, but it is thematically rich: coming-of-age, culture-clash, class, survival, existence and nature, as Roger Ebert says, “the mystery of communication”.   Its use of editing, imagery and symbolism are unmatched in unlocking these wider contemplations on culture, memory and experience, and ultimately it is enchanting and very, very moving.

Nosferatu

Nosferatu

Director ~ Robert Eggers

Writers ~ Robert Eggers, Henrik Galeen, Bram Stoker

2024, United States - United Kingdom -Hungary

Stars ~ Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgård, Willem Defoe,

Aaron Taylor-Johnson

 

And with the greyscale and cinematography of the first few minutes, I was hooked, wondering if it would continue. And it does: Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography is exceptional, and the layers, the depths of the darkness and shadowplay captured are stunning. (The shot of the forest crossroads early on is a favourite.) It’s a lush and gorgeous-looking film throughout, although Eggers’ visual command has never been in doubt.

 

F.W. Murnau’s 1922 original has an uncontested legend and influence as a visual horror tone poem, and so there will always be that “remaking is sacrilegious” and “Why??!!” objections, as if remaking hasn’t always in cinema’s DNA. So that aside, the criticisms I have noted are: there’s no colour; it’s boring; it’s just a ‘Dracula’ rip-off (!); and for Robin from Dark Corners, it’s laughable with bad dialogue and acting, and he’s not the only one. None of which landed with me or challenged my enjoyment and sense of being impressed. (Robin is more chastising Eggers’ film for being not the film he wanted rather than what it is, which is a starting point that rarely gets off the runway for me: his summary is that the film is bad, unnecessary and laughable. I enjoy Dark Corners, but we disagree here) 

 

The performances stand out. Nicolas Hoult is great at conveying a man out of his depth but trying to fall back on patriarchal constructs to convince himself he’s in control, especially with his wife. Willem Defoe is reliably ornate, but not as gung-ho as Simon McBurney as Knock, biting off pigeon heads and scenery with equal gusto. Lily-Rose Depp gives it her all, certainly giving Ellen Hutter an agency, with the moment where it all goes ‘The Exorcist’ both a high-point with her physical contortions and most groan-worthy when it goes all Demonic Voice.

 

Speaking of voices: Bill Skarsgård’s Count Orlok provides a most thick and mannered accent. Skarsgård trained to lower his voice an octave and speaks a likeness of the dead language of Duncian, and where I was left in wonder at the topography of his pronunciation, others apparently found it ridiculous. The look is daring in that Orlok looks exactly like the corpse of a period nobleman, neither as monstrous as Max Schreck – a true otherworldly nightmare that makes you wonder how he would convincingly move in the real world – or as seductive as many others. Manuel Batencourt says that “In choosing to make Count Orlok repulsive, you sap it of both the metaphorical potential and the effect you want on your audience.”, but Schreck is the yardstick here rather than Lugosi or Reeve, and the effect is to present something more probable than either: a regal strigoi, if you will. It is obsession and decay rendered here rather than temptation and ravishment and the reeking charmlessness is all to the point.

 

In performances, the hidden treat here is the impressive turn by Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Friedrich Harding, providing as a character a touchstone to the normality under siege by the supernatural, and losing. In many ways, he does as much to carry the baggage as Depp, chapping at the bit as his domestic bliss is increasingly under siege.  

 

It is a pretty, lush film, full of nuance, a few shocks and a pleasing depth of Craig Lathrop’s set design and period detail. The altitude of Gothicism and melodrama here falls between Eggers’ meticulousness of ‘The Witch’ and the plunge-ahead romp of ‘The Northman’, a taste both sombre and ripe with hints of black humour. It’s almost as if Eggers has found the balance now to be both mainstream and true to his esotericism. A labour of love for a project that seems to have defined his career from the very start when he put on a theatre production of ‘Nosferatu’, Eggers says he saw this as a chance to tackle the weaknesses of Bram Stoker’s novel. Indeed, by the second half, it becomes not only an allegory for the pestilence and pandemics of the era but reads like the upper-class male fear of foreign seduction of English women in which the men bond almost homo-erotically to fend off immigrant brutes. By the time the novel gets to Van Helsing’s effusing about male camaraderie, any melodrama conveyed by the films are totally in situ. Eggers speaks of using this as an opportunity to accentuate female agency, and certainly his ‘Nosferatu’ is the Ellen Hutter show with Van Helsing conceding patriarchal authority to her self-sacrifice for the greater good. Also note that it is ultimately Count Orlok that comes across more as an addict.

 

All these facets are agreeable, searching explorations of the original, and if adaptions of well-worn text are to probe weaknesses and a few nuances instead of being comforting facsimiles, then ‘Nosferatu’ is a noble effort. Not least, it is full of arresting imagery and accumulating to an unforgettable final horror portrait. If it speaks to you, it’s just very enjoyable and the artistry makes it just a bit special.