Film Reviews

Ten Canoes

• Rating:
• Director: Rolf De Heer.
• Starring: Crusoe Kurddal, Richard Birrinbirrin, Jamie Gulpilil, Peter Djigirr.
• Details: Australia / 90mins (PG)

"A good story must have a proper telling." If Terrance Malick were to direct a film about Aborigines way back when, it would probably look like Ten Canoes: a slow-moving, ambling story with an abundance of lingering shots of vegetation. You get two stories for the price of one in Ten Canoes: opening with a swooping shot of the outback, we are told through a voiceover that some time ago, a tribe went on a hunting trip. The youngest of the tribe, who still wasn't married, was jealous of his older brother who had two wives. The older brother was aware of this and began to tell a story what would take the whole hunting trip to finish. The story, which happened a long time before that, was of a hunter who had three wives and his younger brother was in love with one of them. And so the storyteller, who takes us through two generations of aborigines with almost childlike guidance, weaves together two coming of age tales. Not a lot happens in Ten Canoes, but it has a relaxing, persuasive element to it and one can only assume that the meandering plot, matched by the wandering voiceover, is how they told stories to each other.

Review by Gavin Burke