There are huge problems when attempting to make what amounts to an art film while working to sell it to the general public. Getting into even more difficult territory, a British filmmaker, attempting to make an Australian film for Australians, but rendering it all in obtuse terms, couldn’t have ended in some financial success. That wasn't Nicholas Roeg’s objective. He wasn’t concerned with crafting a money maker, although, surely, he wouldn’t have shied away from a fat paycheck. But everything that goes into setting up a production like this – foreigners commenting on a country, basing the film on an outlined script and improvising huge portions of the action – should seem odd, even for the early seventies.

At about the same time, American film was undergoing a dramatic shift after producers and directors figured out that features could be made on the cheap during the previous decade. What resulted was something of an American renaissance. It doesn’t seem like the same wellspring was tapped in other countries, even as the time’s adventurous tendencies were. But Roeg, who wouldn’t ever really work in the most commercial tones, went in on Walkabout.

There are basically three things that standout about the film – well four, if you included the oddly modern sounds set atop of the film’s imagery. But the beginning of the film needs to be dealt with as a pair of children find themselves setting up for a picnic in the middle of the desert and wind up having their father start shooting at them, blow up their car and turn the gun on himself. Surely, the scene was a necessity given the rest of the narrative, but there’s no indication of why all of that transpired.

Walkabout, after the grisly opening, meanders through beautifully rendered shots of the younger brother and his sister negotiating the outback’s terrain with varying degrees of desperation until coming upon an aborigine who nonverbally consents to help the two. It’s the beginning of the film’s mediation on modern and ancient as the aborigine is endlessly contrasted with not just his two new traveling companions, but butchers and hunters while he stalks any variety of prey during the hour or so he’s a part of the film. The character's departure from the narrative, though, is as important as any other context that he’s set in during the film – even as it all ends with the sister day-dreaming about him after she’s happily married.

Tying everything together, though, is the way that Roeg decided to shoot the entire feature. Purposefully artsy, there was no way that Walkabout was going to be able to grab a huge audience. Perhaps knowing this, the director focused efforts on finding any manner of nature, animal, plant or otherwise, to display the freewheeling, yet sensible order of things. Again, part of this plays into the modern world being contrasted with simple living, but it’s all done so elegantly that the film’s loose narrative sometimes doesn't matter.

Walkabout’s masterfully put together, but in discussing such issues really relegated itself to the academic set.