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The panning shot that reveals endless sands just beyond a red brick wall is indicative of Nicolas Roeg's approach, and precisely the thing to bring Black Narcissus to the Outback. Civilization has long been cut off from Nature, the camera lingers on contrasts (a strip of concrete separates the light blues of a gated pool from the deep cobalt of the ocean) as it lays out the mass of glass, horns and signs that is Sydney. The girl (Jenny Agutter) has the prim docility of an apprentice stewardess, her little brother (Luc Roeg) is a towheaded Boy Scout engrossed by his toy soldiers. Their picnic grinds to a halt as the father snaps and the children are left in fraying uniforms in the middle of the desert. "You don't want people to thing we're a couple of tramps, do you?" "What people?" A young Aborigine (David Gulpilil) on his own journey into adulthood joins them. The restless camerawork makes the Australian wilderness lyrically granular: Changes in angle give the terrain from the vantage point of lizard and scorpion, an overhead shot ponders the heroine as a serpent slithers over her sleeping figure, a one-tree oasis is glimpsed with upside-down lenses. Freeze-frames, reversed footage (the father arises with a bullet in his face in a split-second hallucination), a soundtrack of didgeridoos, radio static, cosmic beeps, reptilian hisses. Eden's extraterrestrial side is not lost on the tyke, "I think he might take us to the moon!" Agutter, on the other hand, resists her growing intoxication and colonial fear trumps carnal curiosity. Following the tremendous tactility of Nature, the travelers are welcomed back into society: "Don't touch anything!" A wondrously sustained fever by Roeg, who takes stock of Kubrick's Dawn of Man and Forster's shocks from A Passage to India. The capper is the Land of Lost Content briefly recalled as a middle-class housewife's daydream. With John Meillon, Robert McDara, and Noeline Brown.
--- Fernando F. Croce |