Tracks

“I just wanna be by myself,” Mia Wasikowska says with a shrug, her 3000km death-march across the Australian desert motivated by mystical misanthropy. Wasikowska's waifish wanderer seeks solitude - even when at a '70s psychedelic be-in, she hears forlorn, Nymanesque piano-figures in her head - and prefers the company of beasts. Thus, she takes a caravan of camels and her beloved dog out into the wilderness, concerned bogans (“you must be mad, girlie!”) and fretting family be damned. Marion Nelson's screenplay turns the trek into both a spiritual pilgrimage - her journey to the heart of a stolen continent a kind of martyred apologia; this blonde adventuress the antithesis to its ugly, culturally insensitive tourists - and a journey into the past; Wasikowska haunted by the obligatory flashbacks-that-build-towards-a-big-reveal. John Curran happily casts his camera at the widescreen wonder of the endless horizon, the film both playing up to and undermining notions of the mythical outback, Australian cinema's eternal film set. Ever since Robyn Davison made the real-life expedition in 1977, folk've been trying to bring her human survival tale to screen. But removed from its era, Tracks becomes a symbolic fantasy for the digital era: with Adam Driver photographing everything like some annoying Instagrammer, and the proto-bloggers of the press wanting to reduce Wasikowska to a human meme - Camel Lady - it's a parable about the difficulties of actually getting off the grid.