Walkabout (Nicolas Roeg, 1971)

When I prepared for my Australia trip 1,5 years ago I stumbled upon a number of movies in the Lonely Planet guide. I am not sure anymore if Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout was in there, but I would say it is obligatory for anyone who somehow relates to this beautiful country. Many hail this movie as a masterpiece and I can fully understand why. I will get into the cinematic qualities shortly but first I have to say it was a very personal experience for me, having been a guest Down Under for a year I felt somewhat melancholic watching the red hot desert, the kangaroos, the carpet pythons and even listening to the buzzing blowflies made me want to go back. Disregarding my personal attachment this movie is a pearl!

It tells the story of a father (who works in mining, still the main driver of Australia’s flourishing economy) of two children who took them outback and commits a bizarre suicide. The teenage girl (Jenny Agutter) and her younger brother (Luc Roeg, the director’s son) end up in the deserted but beautiful outback and seem doomed until they run into a 16-year old Aborigine boy.

Director Roeg started his career as a cinematographer (Lawrence of Arabia, Fahrenheit 451) and this is visible throughout the entire film. He captures the endless beauty and harmonious nature in a poetic way like for instance Malick can and uses intelligent editing. His obvious message lies in the visual contradictions between nature and (mining) industry (mainly towards the end). The cross-cutting between the Aborigine boy slaying a Kangaroo and the conventional butcher says a lot but there is more. Like Roger Ebert points out in his spot-on review there is also the issue of communication.

There is definitely a sexual attraction or tension developing between the 14-year old girl and the Aborigine boy but since they cannot communicate the black native (who has no problems communicating with the younger brother) has to fall back to his ritual dance which doesn’t have the desired effect. One could interpret this as if the cultural differences get in the way of natural developments in a number of ways as pointed out by Roeg.

A lot of the problems that are going on in Australia with the Aboriginals are left implicit by the director and are visualized by the surroundings and how both cultures are treating animals and especially nature. Roeg does make explicit that 'western' Australians and Aborigines are in two different worlds together with the striking scene with the abandoned car, not very subtle, but effective. On the other hand this film doesn’t explicitly points out the country’s history of genocide (this is what happened!) but leaves room for interpretation. It may not reach every viewer, but instead of making a 'standard' moralizing picture, we got our visual and poetic masterpiece.

I saw the final sequence 4 times and I believe it is one of the most beautiful and at the same time depressing scenes I ever saw. For a film from the early seventies it is scary how it predicts and criticizes developments that have expanded more and more over the years. I believe it is not just criticizing the Australian mining industrialization, Walkabout is a general statement about man's attitude towards nature.

9/10

Hwal (Kim Ki Duk, 2005)

Asia produces a lot of movies that are getting more and more popular in our western filmworld. One of best known movie-countries for us is probably South Korea. Director Kim Ki Duk stole my heart after I saw his Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring and Bin-Jip (3-Iron). Of course I want to watch all of his movies (I am a cinephile…) and today it was Hwal or the Bow.

Like many great movies this picture deserves its credit for the feeling and mood it gives you as a viewer (for me this is something where Ki Duk always succeeded so far). The director is not shy of showing us some of his trademarks again which are, in this case, minimal dialogue and a story on a single isolated location.

In Hwal the location is a fishing boat owned by an older man around 60. His only company a 16 year old beautiful girl who he will marry the day she turns 17. The boat serves as a fishing location for visitors, some of them are talking about the rumours that the girl went missing when she was 6 and her parents are still looking for her. The old man, equipped with bow and arrow, is very protective of his fiancée and fires warning shots towards anyone who shows an interest in the young girl. The old man also predicts the future of his guests if they request, he does this with a very odd and dangerous ritual. After this the little girl whispers something in the man’s ear after which he tells his guests their future. Apart from this ritual the two main characters are not talking at all.

When a younger guy visits the boat, the isolated girl fancies him instantly and the two seem to fall in love. Of course he is chased off the boat at first by the old man, resulting in alienation from the girl towards her future husband. But can the love between the two young people be stopped by the old man eventually?

The story about this somewhat unconventional love triangle begs for at least some dialogue from either the old man or his fiancée but Ki Duk manages to tell his story without and this is exactly the strength and talent of this director. The imagery and colouring is beautiful as usual and the director shows again how to tell his story with minimal text but optimal acting performances and directing. The final act of the movie is bizarre on the one hand but I have to admit it gave me goosebumps, merely because of an awesome soundtrack.

Not as good as his earlier mentioned masterpiece Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring but again a great film from the Korean master of cinematic poetry. Poëcinema if you wish.

8/10

Kárhozat (Béla Tarr, 1988)

Opening take: A bleak industrial landscape with the background noise of a coal power plant. The camera slowly zooms out and we see how some guy is witnessing the daily industrial process from his room. It’s a take of a couple of minutes where basically nothing happens but it sets the tone if it comes to the mood of the movie and the environment we are in.

With this scene I started watching my first Bèla Tarr movie called Kárhozat or Damnation. It is black and white, has long takes with an extremely slowly panning camera, no establishing shots, making the images fascinating and even though it may look empty at first, there is so much to see. I wouldn’t call it beauty, the movie is not an advertisement for Hungary, but the cinematography is awesome!

The plot is absolutely not important but I will try to summarize it. We see a somewhat depressed recluse in his local bar Titanik. He falls in love with a blonde singer. The owner asks him to participate in a smuggling scheme. He asks the husband of the singer to do the job so he has his hands free with her. We see how the protagonist is trying to get to her, sometimes subtle, sometimes violently, sharing his deep and philosophical insights with her and the viewer.

Again, this plot is just a means for the director to give us an impression of the bleak circumstances of a country in the last years of a Communistic regime. The movie puts its viewer in a depressive mood with ease and hypnotises with beautiful images and camerawork. Tarr chooses to repeatingly focus on rain (in both dialogue and visually), stray dogs and sad surroundings. I believe that he deliberately chose for a black and white movie to make it as bleak as possible.

Kárhozat was the first Tarr movie I watched and it was exactly what I was expecting. It is not digested lightly and the images contain so much sadness in every detail that I will wait a while before I’ll watch another one. The director does not use establishing shots but positions his camera close to the objects or characters he is observing resulting in some surprises when he slowly pans to a different corner (for instance the off-screen diegetic music, there always seems to be a musician in every corner). This unconventional trademark technique makes every take interesting and creates an undefinable suspense.

This filmmaker got my attention and I will try to watch more (his next one Sátántangó has a runtime of 450 minutes, so I may have to schedule….) but I will make sure to be in the right mood and circumstances. Definitely not your conventional popcorn film!

8/10