Nicolas Roeg's "Walkabout" leaves two middle-class white kids stranded in the Outback, forced to survive on their own. They connect with an aboriginal boy, who is essentially doing the same thing -- but is much better prepared for it. His walkabout is a scheduled tribal rite of passage, an initiation into manhood.

The result is a kind of Down-Under "Lord of the Flies," getting its first theatrical screening here, at the Three Rivers Film Festival, since its initial release with a beautiful new print that brings out every detail of the 1971 original's superb cinematography.

This fragile adaptation of James Vance Marshall's novel begins with a hectic montage of Australian urban life by way of introduction to The Girl (14-year-old Jenny Agutter) and her little brother (Luc Roeg, the director's son). Their dad picks them up at school for a picnic in the country.

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'Walkabout'

• Starring: Jenny Agutter, Luc Roeg, David Gulpilil
• Rating: PG (re-rated on appeal from original R)

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It's no picnic. The crazed father shoots himself during the car trip, leaving them to fend for themselves in a middle-of-nowhere desert. Insects, reptiles and other wild animals (in different stages of life or decaying death) prove less daunting than hunger and thirst. The girl clings to her portable radio for reassurance, if not practical assistance.

They are dangerously close to exhaustion and death when a mirage turns out to be real: A joyously free aboriginal boy (David Gulpilil) spots them, nurtures them and thenceforth guides them on the long trek toward "civilization."

Agutter is brilliant beyond her years as the tough Caucasian teen incapable of comprehending or caring about anything beyond her "own kind" and survival. Roeg fils is likewise wonderful as the kid brother who adapts more easily (and psychologically) to all radical changes in circumstance. This is, at heart, a true "photoplay" in which images tell the story. Not a word is wasted in the precious few sparse exchanges of dialogue.

Girl (to her brother): "Put your shirt on."

White Boy (indicating Black Boy): "He hasn't got HIS shirt on!"

Girl: "He hasn't got a shirt."

White Boy: "He can have mine."

Most films revolve around plot or characters. With "Walkabout," it's location. This wilderness is not unlike Beckett's bare stage in "Waiting for Godot" -- nowhere in particular, and everywhere. Roeg's cinematography and John Barry's eerie, suspenseful music heighten the sense of a mystical place, and the film as a kind of dream.

As personal "visions" go, you won't find any better than Roeg's, whose every shot is a painting. He was the photographer on "Fahrenheit 451," "Far From the Madding Crowd" and "Petulia." His first stab at direction was "Performance" (1970) with Mick Jagger, followed by "Don't Look Now" (1973), "The Man Who Fell to Earth" with David Bowie (1976), and "Bad Timing" (1980) and "Insignificance" (1985) with wife Theresa Russell -- all full of dazzling visuals at the expense of conventional storytelling.

In "Walkabout," Roeg and his young heroine keep their emotional distance from us. She was frightened of her father and, when he kills himself, seems almost relieved. She is similarly afraid of the aborigine, whose terrifying courtship dance has the opposite of its intended effect on her. But why are we so automatically focused on her fate? Why shouldn't we care as much about the aboriginal boy, who might die of a broken heart?

"Walkabout" works wonderfully as a simple survival story but is usually read as a metaphor for the Noble Savage's superiority to civilization. Maybe. But it's not just "a pretty piece of middlebrow anthropology," as one critic-detractor maintained.

Roeg doesn't really think we'd all be happier spearing marsupials for dinner. His final quote from "A Shropshire Lad" ("... the land of lost content, I see it shining plain/The happy highways where I went and cannot come again") suggests "Walkabout" is less about "survival" than wisdom exchanged for innocence -- not so much a clash as a mesh of cultures: "Civilization" and "the wilderness" are equally near-and-yet-so-far.

It all depends on which you long for -- or are lost from.

Plays at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Harris.