The Present Is Another Country

My Mirror column:

The unforgettable David Gulpilil, who won a 2014 Best Actor award at Cannes for Charlie's Country, first appeared on screen 45 years ago. 

While writing about Thithi last month, I was reminded of a film I saw at IFFI two years ago, called Charlie's Country. On the surface, the two films have little in common. Thithi's gently sardonic observational portrait of a Kannadiga universe stitches together an impressive multigenerational cast of non-actors, while Charlie's Country stays almost entirely with its principal protagonist, a grizzled Aboriginal man called Charlie. 

But at the vortex of Thithi's whirl of activity is also a wiry old man. Gadappa (literally 'Beardman') is determined not to be tied down by restrictions of religious ritual or law or property. Like Charlie, he wants to be free. The difference between them is that Gadappa has once been a householder. And that grihasthi, unhappy as it was, has left him a line of sons and grandsons. It is this family, this community, that wants to make him conform, and it is them that he defies when he wanders off with his preferred tipple instead of signing documents and lighting pyres. 

The restrictions Charlie wants to be rid of are of a wholly different kind. Though he ostensibly lives in an Aboriginal 'community', there is nothing left of the world he once knew. The old social fabric, ripped from its inherent connection to the land, is adrift. 

Rolf de Heer's film begins on a tenuously comic note. Frustrated with life on the dole and lowgrade industrially processed food, Charlie and his friend Black Pete rig up a battered Land Rover and leave the corrugated shacks they call home to set out on a hunting expedition. They manage to snag a water buffalo, but their guns, the car and the fresh meat-to-be are all confiscated by the local authorities. Down but not out, Charlie crafts himself a spear from a young tree. But this, too, is an unauthorised weapon, according to the white-fella policeman. When even the spear is taken away, Charlie decides the only way to reclaim his country is by living in it the old way. 

As you watch David Gulpilil walk into the wilderness, armed with not much except the clothes on his back, you cannot but remember the magnificent actor's first cinematic appearance — as a limber young fellow in Nicholas Roeg's haunting, hallucinogenic Walkabout, which turns 45 years old this week. The 1971 film, with Gulpilil as an Aboriginal teenager who saves two English children lost in the desert, remains memorable for, among other things, the quivering thread of incomprehension and fascination between Gulpilil and the white girl (British actress Jenny Agutter, then 17). 

In Roeg's film, Gulpili's character was on a walkabout, a traditional Aboriginal practice in which a boy who turns 16 must spend months learning to survive on his own in the bush, hunting and gathering food and water, essentially living without shelter. 

It is the genius of De Heer's film — and a profound source of its tragedy — to return the actor, some five decades later, to another filmic walkabout. This time, though, there is no fantasy of cross-cultural conversation. I don't know if they did even when Roeg arrived to make his film in 1969, but white people in Australia no longer live fearfully on the edges of the wilderness, attracted or frightened by its untamed beauty. Certainly they need no rescuing. 

Walkabout contains many scenes of Gulpilil spearing animals for food, from small lizards to kangaroos. A near-climactic sequence made clear the difference between Aboriginal hunting and the white man's hunting, between hunting for survival and hunting for sport. A lean, young, big-eyed Gulpilil is wrestling with a single buffalo, on foot. He has almost succeeded in bringing it down when he is swept off his feet by two white hunters in a jeep and a cloud of dust. Within minutes they have gunned down several animals, taking away only a couple and leaving the others to rot where they fell. Despite Roeg's somewhat dated zooms, jerky pauses and associative visual leaps (to a maggot-infested carcass, for instance, and later a pile of bleached buffalo skulls), it is a powerful sequence. 

Watching Gulpilil now as Charlie, heading out to hunt with a vehicle and guns, feels strangely wrong. And yet, if 'civilisation' has come to the bushman, why should the machine not be part of it? 

But the Aborigine has neither been equipped to handle Western industrial society, nor can he possibly remain the mythical being he once was. What little equipment Charlie has seems decrepit, like his surroundings. In any case, hunting even a single buffalo for food is now illegal. Having killed off animals on an industrial scale, the white man now forbids hunting. The irony is total. 

We may want to watch Gulpilil live off the land and hunt with a spear. Gulpilil may want to watch himself live off the land and hunt with a spear — for the wrenching quality of these films derives from the fact that the actor is playing a character whose predicament is not distant from his own. But people are not untouched by the histories that sweep over them. Having fractured this world into pieces, how can we now expect its members to present themselves as unharmed wholes?

Published in Mumbai Mirror, 3rd July 2016.

Picture This: The call of the wild

Forty-five years ago, a British director made a striking, surreal film about the idea of civilisation, shot in the Australian desert.

Sometime in the ’60s, a British filmmaker looking to make his transition from cinematographer to independent director zeroed in on a novel called The Children, by James Vance Marshall. First published in 1959, the book was about two American children stranded in the Australian outback after a plane crash. An Aboriginal boy helps them survive and make their way back to Western ‘civilisation’, but himself dies from the influenza virus he catches from the two.

I haven’t read Marshall’s book, but here’s what I see this narrative as suggesting: that cross-cultural communication in an unequal world is possible, but ends inevitably in tragedy for the colonised. And that white people might fail to communicate their emotions and intentions, but they communicate their diseases effortlessly.

The film, however, dropped the influenza part of the plot. The Children was written for a ‘juvenile audience’, today’s YA. I imagine that Nicholas Roeg — for that was the filmmaker’s name — wanted to retain the childlike excitement of the colonial adventure, but also produce something more open-ended and complex. Working from a screenplay by the British playwright Edward Bolton, Roeg made the children English residents of Australia. He also played with a shift of focus to the Aboriginal side of things: the film starts with this text: “In Australia, when an Aborigine man-child reaches sixteen, he is sent out into the land. For months, he must live from it. Sleep on it. Eat of its fruit and flesh. Stay alive. Even if it means killing his fellow-creatures. The Aborigines call it the WALKABOUT. This is the story of a “WALKABOUT”.”

Having announced this theme, however, Roeg’s camera — and our gaze — stays largely with the white people. Walkabout, released on July 1,1971 — exactly 45 years ago this week — cast Roeg’s own son Luc (credited as Lucien John) and the striking teenaged British actress Jenny Agutter as the siblings, while giving the role of the Aboriginal boy to the extraordinary David Gulpilil (wrongly credited in the film as Gumpilil).

Yet right from the opening scenes, the film is intent on defamiliarising white ‘civilisation’. The uneven, nasal drone of the Aboriginal didjeridoo is overlaid onto scenes from white Australian urban life, emphasising people’s disconnect from their surroundings: a middle-aged man in a suit sits down in a strangely alienating space; a little boy (John) in school uniform looks into a book as he walks. A magnificent shot shows the little boy walking home, framed by the ominous shadow of a gnarled old tree.

Strangeness, Roeg suggests, lies in the eyes of the beholder. Interspersed with the Aboriginal instrument are white-people sounds that seem as jarring — a single phrase of spoken French; a classroom full of white girls chanting the vowels of the English alphabet in unison. A woman making dinner in a white-cube apartment listens to a radio programme about the ortolan, a bird overfed in captivity and then drowned in alcohol to create a gourmet French dish.

Then things get really weird. A few minutes into a desert picnic, the father starts shooting at his children, and then kills himself. The girl (Agutter), being the older one, keeps what has happened from the boy. Gathering up the radio, a bottle of lemonade and tins of food, she walks him further into the desert.

Roeg’s cinematographic eye is extraordinary. Panoramic views of windswept dunes, flat red rocks and circling mountain ridges alternate with vivid close-ups of colourful, sometimes dangerous creatures that live in this landscape: frilled lizards, chameleons, scorpions, porcupines. The film pauses its narrative for us to observe these creatures, so comfortably at home here — unlike our hatted-coated protagonists, who are so profoundly not.

The little boy is initially excited to be on an adventure, but in a few days they have reached a state of extreme hunger and thirst. It is then that they encounter the Aboriginal boy. He looks blankly at the girl as she pours out floods of anxious words, but when the younger boy mimes drinking, he laughs and instantly crafts a reed pipe to draw out water from the ‘dry’ ground. He is as much of this world as the animals he kills for food. He can make spears out of branches, sunburn salve out of animal blood, and food out of nearly any living thing.

The white children, now shielded from the harsh vagaries of the landscape, begin to revel in its idyllic freedoms — swinging from branches, swimming in pools, roasting meat on naked fires. But what makes the film particularly intense is an unspoken erotic tension, the web of mutual fascination that quivers between Agutter and Gulpilil. But that fascination is ill-fated, because Agutter’s character is afraid of it, afraid to admit to it.

Before Walkabout, few films had dealt with Australian inter-race relations. Most notable was Charles Chauvel’s Jedda (1955), in which an Aboriginal baby is brought up in a white family. Jedda’s white mother is appalled when the teenager wants to join her Aboriginal age-mates on a walkabout. The tragic climax is framed by a white view of the wildness of the land — and the people.

A few years after Walkabout came Peter Weir’s eerie Picnic at Hanging Rock, based on the bestselling 1967 novel about a group of white schoolgirls who disappear while on a Valentine’s Day picnic in 1900. Weir, too, partook of the mystery and wildness of the Australian landscape — though here, any erotic charge was expressed by young white women, and suppressed by their Victorian schoolmistresses.

Those films could not go beyond whiteness, or the idea of a separation of spheres. In contrast, Walkabout feels startlingly fresh. The white girl and the black boy circle each other warily, their interactions filled with a nervous energy. Dreamlike though his film is, Roeg makes no outlandish claims. Things end badly for the boy. But it is her life that is forever shadowed by the remembered grandeur of the wilderness.

Published in BL Ink, 2 July, 2014.