WALKABOUT, 40 years later

WALKABOUT (1971)─Two young children, a boy (Luc Roeg) and a teen-age schoolgirl (Jenny Augutter) are stranded in the Australian outback.  Their father drives them far into the desert, where they stop for what they expect to be an idyllic  family picnic. Suddenly, without warning, their father begins shooting at them. When the two children run for cover, he sets the car on fire and kills himself. The boy and the girl are now completely lost and alone.

 

      By dawn the next day, both children are weak from exposure. Discovering a small pool with a fruit tree, the boy and the girl unashamed, take off their clothes and spend the next few hours blissfully  playing and bathing naked. Next morning, the pool has dried up, just as they are about to despair, they meet an Aboriginal boy on "walkabout," a ritualistic journey where he must leave his tribe, live off the land, and prove his manhood. The young Aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) and the girl cannot communicate, but across the void they make a connection, a universal understanding of humanity.  With the Aboriginal boy as their guide, the two white children learn how to survive in the outback.

 

      The three children travel together for several days, with the Aborigine boy sharing food he has caught hunting. Together they learn to communicate using words and gestures. These characters have no names, yet in their anonymity, they represent us.  At one point the Aboriginal boy and the girl notice each other’s naked bodies, there is a definite spark of chemistry between them that transcends the 40,000 years of primordial human existence that separates a common English Schoolgirl and the black Aboriginal boy. The girl is naked and the boy watches as she swims in a deep pool.

 

      Walkabout is about many things, but is known for principally only one thing: Jenny Augutter’s nude scenes. Jenny Augutter was just 16 years-old at the time of principal photography was for Walkabout. I think there is something  missing in the discussion when we consider the morality of the depiction of a young girl's naked body. The the film is about the natural world, being naked is a natural state. The two children are dying, dehydrated, the water in the pool represents life. The scene represents the most honest reaction in the world, to take off ones clothes and immerse oneself in the life giving water. A brother and sister naked together?  I for one don't have a problem with that. First of all the human body is beautiful, and secondly lets be upfront and honest, Jenny Augutter is one beautiful girl! The overall undertones of child pornography are nothing more than the egregious western prudery.

 

     Although this is a sound film, and the characters talk to one another, this film has no real meaningful dialogue, it is a purely visual film, yet it speaks volumes.  Director Nicolas Roeg’s (“Don't Look Now”) cinematographic skills are clearly on display, he has a special admiration for the sweeping vistas of Australia’s awesome scenic landscape as well as the sensuality of Jenny Augutter naked body.  The whole effect is embellished by John Barry’s sublimely magical score. This is perhaps the most naked movie ever filmed without a hint of sexuality.

     
Walkabout *** ½

VIOLETTE NOZIERE

VIOLETTE NOZIÈRE (1978)─Is a French crime film directed by Claude Chabrol adapted for the screen from a novel by Jean-Marie Fitère and starring Isabelle Huppert. The film, is based on a true French murder case in 1934, Violette Nozière is a fourteen-year-old French school girl who secretly works as a prostitute while living with her unsuspecting parents. 

     Rebelling against her mean spirited and petty petit-bourgeois parents, her father Baptiste (Jean Carmet)  and mother Germaine (Stéphane Audran). Violette falls in love with a spendthrift young man Émile (Jean Dalmain).  Émile’s careless and wanton spending habits eventually cause Violette to hand over increasing amounts of money from her prostitution earnings soon she resorts to stealing from her parents to support her lover.

     After contracting syphilis from sex with multiple partners, Violette's double life is scandalously discovered.  She conspires to poison her parents ostensibly to get her hands on their money. She plies them with glasses of barbiturate-laced “medication,” which she claims has been prescribed to them by the family doctor; her father dies, her mother barely survives.

   Overnight, Violette’s  lurid act of “double parricide” became the most sensational crime of the French interwar era—At trial, her defense claimed her father raped her. All to no avail, the verdict of the court was guilty, the sentence, death by guillotine. Violette’s sentence is eventually commuted.

     The film was entered into the main competition at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival, where Isabelle Huppert won the award for best actress.  VIOLETTE NOZIÈRE represents one of my great "lost" quest movies of the seventies.  Just twenty years-old in 1978, I found myself thoroughly  in awe of Isabelle Huppert's smoldering sexuality. Her Frenchness alone made her seem very exotic and the very fact that I had never seen Violette, elevated the film at least in my own mind to virtual mystical status. Hard to find, the film is now available on Netflix.

Violette Nozière *** ½     

PRETTY BABY, a retrospective

PRETTY BABY (1978)─Directed by Louis Malle from a screenplay by Polly Platt. The year was 1917, the year the United States entered World War I in the waning days of legal prostitution in the infamous red-light district of the Storyville section of New Orleans. Hattie (Susan Sarandon), a prostitute working in an elegant brothel run by the Madame Nell, has a twelve-year-old daughter Violet (Brooke Shields). Introverted photographer E.J. Bellocq (Keith Carradine) comes calling with his camera.
    Bellocq asks permission to take photographs of the women. Madame Nell agrees, but only if he pays. Peculiarly, Bellocq chooses only to takes pictures, he never has sex with any of the women.  His sole passion is photographing whores. His particular favourite subject is Hattie, as he photographs Hattie, we come to understand that the camera, the act of taking pictures has somehow become a surrogate extension of Bellocq's repressed sexuality. His strange demeanor and odd mannerisms fascinate Violet, whom he initially regards as a pest.
     The character of E.J. Bellocq is based on a real photographer who captured on glass plates of silver nitrate the real prostitutes of Storyville. Though the specific story built around him in the movie is fictional. The real Bellocq photographs are used to create a sense of the time and place and evoke the movie with authenticity.
     Over the next few months, Nell decides that Violet is now old enough for her virginity to be auctioned. At the auction Violet is bought by an apparently quiet customer, but her first experience of sex is brutal. Hattie, meanwhile, aspires to escape prostitution. She marries, and abandons Violet, leaving her daughter behind to face a life of prostitution. Bellocq continues to spend time with Violet, entranced by her beauty, and photogenic face. When the brothel closes, Bellocq marries Violet, ostensibly to protect her from a dangerous world; however there are some who question his motives.
     At the beginning of this film, there's a tight shot on Violet’s strikingly beautiful face. She appears to be watching something with great interest and we hear a woman moaning off camera. Since Pretty Baby is a movie about prostitution, one might naturally assume that the child is watching some sexual act. Actually, it’s just the opposite; as the moans turn to cries of pain. We realize with a wink and a nod that Director Louis Malle has tricked us. We see that it’s not a woman in the throws of ecstasy but rather a woman in labor, and that Violet is witnessing her baby brother being born.

     Pretty Baby is famous for one thing and one thing only: twelve year-old Brooke Shields get'n nekid. Brooke has four separate nude scenes, including one scandalous scene where she is seen completely naked lying in repose on a couch, while Bellocq takes her photograph. Apparently child nudity, any child nudity has been deemed too much for our modern American twenty-first century sensibilities.  If you view the new politically corrected  DVD version of Pretty Baby, be forewarned, the movie has been censored by re-framing the original scenes. This was done to avoid any naughty shots of Brooke’s pubic area or her baby buttocks.  If you want to see the original theatrical movie as shot, cut by Malle, you need to find  a VHS version.
     On the other hand, if all you want is to see nekid pictures of  Brooke Shields, the nudity in Pretty Baby is pretty tame by comparison to the Gary Gross photo shoot.  Two years earlier, before the hue and cry over Pretty Baby, Teri Shields, the consummate stage-mother allowed her then ten-year-old Brooke  to pose for photographer Gary Gross WARNING THESE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE EXPLICIT.  Brooke Shields by Gary Gross.  *Whew* Brooke poses completely nude in  a bath tub,  we’re not talking baby’s first bath pictures here. Brooke is posed, tarted up, oiled down, in all her full frontal prepubescent glory. No higher authority than the U.S. Supreme court ruled these pictures "art" and not child pornography.  Art or not, they are way too controversial to post on this blog.  Pretty Baby remains a testament to the fact that the 70’s were a vastly more liberated time, at least when it comes to issues of a naked child's sexuality. No American studio could (or would) make this film today.

Pretty Baby (1978)  ** ½