On DVD: Sex, Survival and the Dreamy Pleasures of Walkabout

Nicolas Roeg's famous 1971 career-establisher Walkabout seems in synopsis to be a subtext-laden adventure saga: a young British boy and his teenage sister are lost in the Outback, and survive only thanks to the friendship of a teen Aboriginal boy hunting in the desert. But it's really about sex. Sex, sex, sex, from virtually the first anxious scenes back in Adelaide, where the siblings' father watches his nubile daughter frolic in the pool, and later when they're in the wilderness for a picnic, when every glimpse of her legs and peachy skin makes the man glower. Soon enough, he's got the gun and gasoline out, ready for a full-on murder-suicide, and the kids escape with only a little lemonade and the boy's toys.

Evocations of Walkabout usually skip this opening nightmare scenario, because the ostensible "coming of age" hippie-era odyssey that follows seems more intent on coolly blowing our 1971 minds than making a lot of textual sense. But the father is the film's key moving force -- his unspoken incestuous pathology and its fallout is just as chilling as the rest of the film is placid, as if Roeg and Co. didn't want to admit any more than the kids did that their family has disintegrated into a bloody torchfest. Instead, they assemble a replacement family in the desert with David Gulpilill's native lad.

But that's ruined by sex as well -- specifically, by 16-year-old Jenny Agutter's luscious, mellow doe-ish-ness, cavorting as she does in a short-short skirt and see-through blouse, and, famously, skinny-dipping in a mountain pool. For most of the film you'd think the characters and filmmakers would be interested in the stress of survival, but sexual tension is what makes the Outback hot. Gulpilill kills, butchers and roasts untold amounts of lizards, birds and kangaroos, but the takeaway isn't man-vs.-nature, but man-vs.-the dewy heaven of a space between Agutter's coltish legs.

As classic films about culture clash go, there's not much clash in Walkabout. It's a dreamy, exotic, touristy vacation, and typically for Roeg it's never less than gorgeous and disarmingly shot. It's easy to see why in the latter heyday of the New Wave era it became a favorite of college students and cinephiles (though it has, like much of Roeg's filmography, been overpraised by British critics who didn't have much else in the way of a New Wave to crow about). Today, it's a time piece, and it's a groundbreaker (this was the period when filmmakers were really discovering wildernesses and American highways and French countrysides for the first time), but it also comes across a mite silly. (How anyone can forgive the detour sequence of Italian workers ogling a blonde scientist's crotch and cleavage is beyond me.)

Still, I must confess to an Agutter-philia that now, after seeing Walkabout again after many years, has infiltrated my dreams. In the new Criterion edition's supplements, there's an interview with Agutter from 2008, at the age of 55, and damn if she's not still a heartbreaker, the smartest, kindest, sexiest tramp aunt you ever had. Where has she been? Actually, Agutter's been busy these past decades, mostly in British television. But I want more. Now.