Ten Canoes Reviews

Simple aboriginal tales of their ancestors' tribes, with typical humour.

[font=Century Gothic]"Ten Canoes" starts with a narrator(David Gulpilil) telling a story about his ancestors. Minygululu(Peter Minygululu), husband to three wives, is taking his younger brother, Dayindi(Jamie Gulpilil), to the swamps for a goose hunt for the first time. Minygululu knows that his brother has an eye on his youngest wife, so he tells him about two of his ancestors, Ridjimiraril(Crusoe Kurddal) and Yeeralparil(Jamie Gulpilil), who were in a similar situation.[/font]

[font=Century Gothic]"Two Canoes" is a beautiful exploration of the oral tradition of storytelling in Aboriginal culture.(The film is alternately shot in bleached out colors.) This is how information is related from one generation to the next. For example, Minygululu is not only teaching his younger brother about how to hunt in the swamps but also to be patient and never to do anything rash. In other words, all he has to do is wait and he will get what he wants. Remember in this society, everything is as it has been for thousands of years and will be the same for years to come. Nothing is going anywhere. And if all of that sounds very dry, do not worry. There is enough irreverence to go around for everyone.[/font]

Surprisingly frank and irreverent.

Philosophy of the wise and of the Methuselah.Now really,the ancient language fashion is withering,yes?Unless you bring a true auteur with the name of Rolf de Heer and condemn Mr. Gibson to eternal damnation.Pure and locomotive direction and the b/w interaction with the vibrant antique era is engaging to the folktale narration.

Gods must be Crazy, but without the bottle.

I was literally falling asleep. It was just extremely boring because they made it last so long and the narrator talked in a slow monotone.

An interesting narrative structure and the subject of the aboriginal lifestyle make this a must for anyone looking for something unique.

A pretty fun movie about something that we don't usually see much of. It was enjoyable but also kind of boring ;)

It''s just like a bedtime story a father would tell to his children. Good Narrating!

Great picture. Multi-layered visual and aural gem.

It sounded really interesting so I had to watch it..

it fell short on my expectations.. kind of boring.

This is honestly one of the greatest films I have seen in a long time.

Great story telling!

Brilliant movie I saw in the cinema by complete chance (I wish there were more accidents like that). Cinema as its best, telling you stories that you would never hear otherwise

Probably the best Australian film I have ever had the grand pleasure of viewing.

(*** 1/2): Thumbs Up

This movie was released about 6 months back in Amsterdam in several movie halls, but not in the Pathe chain of theaters. So when during this summer festival it was released, I did not want to miss the opportunity to see this movie.

This movie is set in a pre-historic setting among Aboriginal tribes of Australia who lived at the top most point on the Arnhem Land - Arafura swamp. The story is told as a fable (and a lesson) by an elder to a tribe youth who is attracted towards his elder brother?s wife. In the movie there are two parallel stories ? One, the elder telling a story to the youth, and second, the real story.

I will tell you the real story ? of warrior Ridjimiraril (Cruseo Kurddal) with three wives. His younger brother Yeeralparri (Jamie Gulpilil) getting attracted towards Ridjimiraril?s youngest wives. The tradition says that if the older brother dies then the younger brother marries and takes care of the wives. A stranger (Michael Dawu) from another tribe visits the village and the elders of the village think that the stranger leaves behind evil spirits. One day, the middle wife of Ridjimiraril disappears and due to the suspicion on the stranger, Ridjimiraril kills a person from another tribe, but because he does not bury the body properly, the people of another tribe force and attack on this village and want Ridjimiraril to face the law of the land ? i.e. avoid 150 spears thrown at him by another tribe by dancing (standing on one place). Ridjimiraril dances like a ghost to avoid spears coming at him but in the end one spear pierces his stomach. As his death comes near ? as per the aboriginal traditions ? when people from all tribes come to see his death. Ridjimiraril gets up and does the last death dance with music and songs being played all around him.

There is a lesson that is passed on from centuries through such wonderful stories in the Aboriginal tribes of Australia that teaches people to differentiate from good and bad; and obviously it keeps the tradition alive.

The narrator is the famous aboriginal scholar artist David Gulpilil.

I was totally mesmerized by the movie. It took me off feat. It had such a powerful sense of energy in the narrative and characterization that everything felt real ? so real that it gave a look of an documentary. But let us not forget ? this was a movie, and people acting in the movie.

Hats off to those actors from the tribe who ? for the sake of keeping their history alive ? came forward to do anything for this movie, without any hesitation. All the actors were naked ? barely with any clothes on their body. Which Hollywood actor would be ready to show their full body exposure with so natural feel.

I just fell in love with Crusoe Kurddal ? who portrayed the role of Ridjimiraril to the hitch, so real ? so historic. Wow!!!! What personality, what acting?!!!! It seems he went on his own to seek this role ? and what life he brings to this role. The final death dance is the one that takes heart out of the body. The richness of the tradition just melts our soul away.

The Director Rolf de Heer (who was born in Netherlands ? where I stay now) has struggled since 1984 to make good movies and nurtured his skills so delicately to deliver this beautiful fable to us.

The music, location, cinematography, editing, sound recording etc. every department is just perfect. Trying to find a fault in the narrative was a challenge.

Worth a watch for cine-goers who love good movies. A gem in story telling, better than so much mafia, violence movies that have captured the top 100 movies list! Normally I hesitate giving higher ratings than 8 in my scale of 10. But with such a satisfying movie experience I would give?


(Stars 8.25 out of 10)

[i]Ten Canoes[/i] is a testament to the communal power of oral storytelling, and also a cultural piece concerning a race of Australian aborigines rarely seen in film. The narrative concerns a group of said natives hunting geese. While going about the laborious activities, we hear the story as related by an elder of the group to a younger member of Ridjimiraril, an ancestor who accidentally kills a member of another tribe, and must suffer the consequences. As we navigate our way through the tale, we are privy to the way in which a compelling story is constructed, through the introduction of the principle characters, the establishment of a goal for our protagonist, and the obstacles he faces in attempting to attain his goal. It's all wonderfully engrossing and beautifully shot, as well. A fantastically entertaining fable.

[font=Century Gothic]"Ten Canoes" starts with a narrator(David Gulpilil) telling a story about his ancestors. Minygululu(Peter Minygululu), husband to three wives, is taking his younger brother, Dayindi(Jamie Gulpilil), to the swamps for a goose hunt for the first time. Minygululu knows that his brother has an eye on his youngest wife, so he tells him about two of his ancestors, Ridjimiraril(Crusoe Kurddal) and Yeeralparil(Jamie Gulpilil), who were in a similar situation.[/font]

[font=Century Gothic]"Two Canoes" is a beautiful exploration of the oral tradition of storytelling in Aboriginal culture.(The film is alternately shot in bleached out colors.) This is how information is related from one generation to the next. For example, Minygululu is not only teaching his younger brother about how to hunt in the swamps but also to be patient and never to do anything rash. In other words, all he has to do is wait and he will get what he wants. Remember in this society, everything is as it has been for thousands of years and will be the same for years to come. Nothing is going anywhere. And if all of that sounds very dry, do not worry. There is enough irreverence to go around for everyone.[/font]

"A long, long time ago in a place far, far away" intones a serious-voiced narrator at the start of [b]Ten Canoes[/b], as the camera slowly makes its way along a wide and deserted river. It's a phrase which instantly recalls the opening of [i]Star Wars[/i], but then the narrator collapses into laughter and reassures us that he's "only joking", for this picture is about as far, far away from George Lucas' space epic as it's possible to imagine. This marvellous Australian film does transport us to a world completely apart from our own, but it's a journey deep into the past, exploring traditions of storytelling which stretch far back into Aboriginal culture. The film has a pace and tone unlike anything else you're likely to see, rambling away from the beaten track whenever it feels like it, but completely captivating the audience like a good story should.

[i]Ten Canoes[/i] has been directed by Dutch-born filmmaker Rolf de Heer, but despite his presence this is a film told entirely from the point of view of Australia's Aboriginal people. De Heer developed the story through close collaboration with the Ramingining community, creating a film which - aside from the English voiceover - is the first indigenous-language picture the country has produced.That voiceover is our guide as we pass through time, and it is provided by the famous Australian actor David Gulpilil. He introduces us to ten of his ancestors, in an unspecified time long before any white men had set foot on Australian soil, and they are in the midst of a goose egg-gathering ritual which necessitates the creation of the titular canoes. One of the participants is Dayindi (Jamie Dayindi Gulpilil), a young man on his first such trip, and it quickly transpires that he has his eye on the youngest and most attractive of Minygululu's (Peter Minygululu) three wives. To prove to his young companion that such a relationship isn't a good idea, Minygululu begins to tell a story; a story which takes us even further back into time, a story which introduces us to the ancients. The story within the story is about a young man named Yeeralparil (Dayindi again) who lusts after - you've guessed it - the youngest and prettiest wife of his brother Ridjimiraril (Crusoe Kerddal).

Of course, things don't turn out very well for the characters in this cautionary tale, but [i]Ten Canoes[/i] is in no hurry to show us why. The sections of the film involving Dayindi and Minygululu are told in black-and-white, while the story Minygululu unfolds is depicted in colour, and de Heer switches back and forth between these two strands of [i]Ten Canoes[/i] throughout. Often the storytelling will simply stop while the business of canoe-making and egg-gathering must be attended to, and the film possesses a constant desire to explore all of the tangents which shoot off from this story before it bothers with anything so prosaic as a narrative thread. In his voiceover, Gulpilil compares the telling of a story to a tree, with branches growing in all sorts of directions, and the comparison is as close as you might get to capturing the essence of [i]Ten Canoes[/i], because this is a film which almost impossible to categorise in any traditional way.

By this point my description of [i]Ten Canoes[/i] will have proved to be a massive turn-off for many people. It sounds like a dry, anthropological study - a film which is more laudable for the intentions behind its making than the merits of the picture itself - so perhaps it's time to mention how funny [i]Ten Canoes[/i] is. The film is full of laughs, with much surprisingly ribald humour being based around farting, shitting and cock jokes. Gulipilil's narration is also wittily integrated into the piece, with the actor often chuckling at the onscreen events, and de Heer gets plenty of mileage from speculative sequences which imagine various potential consequences for a given situation. Certain characters also bring a dash of eccentricity to the party, such as the huge-bellied elder Birrinbirrin (Richard Birrinbirrin), whose insatiable appetite for honey is a fine running gag., and throughout [i]Ten Canoes[/i] the performances from the cast of non-actors, most of whom had never seen a film, are as good as they need to be.

[i]Ten Canoes[/i] is a remarkable achievement for Rolf de Heer, a filmmaker who is probably best known for his utterly bizarre 1993 film [i]Bad Boy Bubby[/i] and whose direction here is so good it makes you wonder why he has struggled to make any sort of impact in the intervening years. De Heer's work on this picture is even more admirable due to the sensitivity surrounding the depiction of Aboriginal culture on screen, and he treats his collaborators with complete respect, never condescending or simplifying their traditions, and never imposing a 'whitefella' viewpoint on their story. Despite the meandering nature of the tale, de Heer keeps a sprightly and constantly intriguing edge to his direction; his slow pans down the river or through the trees recall Malick, and his documentary-style observation of a strange culture recalls Herzog. De Heer also produces a couple of genuinely wonderful moments here, most of which occur during the film's final third. The spear-throwing 'payback', with two character frantically trying to dodge the onslaught, is tremendously orchestrated; and the film creates a haunting, otherworldly atmosphere during the death dance towards the end of the film, suggesting a genuine sense of transcendence as a man's soul is released from his body.

By the time Minygululu has finished telling Dayindi this story the lessons at the heart of it have been learned by the young listener, and even if [i]Ten Canoes[/i] climaxes in a rather unexciting way, the film argues that the telling of the story is as important as the story itself as it gets passed down the ages, the lessons of the past influencing the thoughts and actions of a younger generation. [i]Ten Canoes[/i] is a mesmerising film which entranced me for 90 minutes, transporting me to a different time and place, and it's a unique experience which will surely be embraced by anyone tired of conventional cinematic narratives. "It's not like your story, it's my story" the narrator tells us, "and my story, you've never seen before".


On the subject of storytelling, stop me if you've heard this one before. A group of men head out into the wilderness to partake in a spot of fishing. This weekend, away from their wives and day-to-day hassles, is one of the highlights of their year, but on the first night their enjoyment is disrupted by a shocking discovery. The body of young woman is spotted floating in the river near their camp, she is naked and has been murdered. The obvious thing to do in this situation would be to report the incident to the authorities, but with no desire to disrupt their weekend of freedom, the men instead tie the girl to a log to prevent her from floating away and vow to report the discovery as soon as they return home.

The story I'm relaying here will be instantly recognisable to many as [i]So Much Water So Close to Home[/i], the Raymond Carver short story, and even if they've never read it then most people will be familiar with the tale from its appearance in Robert Altman's [i]Short Cuts[/i]. In that 1993 film, Altman made this particular story part of his LA-based Carver mosaic, but the new Australian film [b]Jindabyne[/b] gives it a movie all to itself; transferring the action to Australia and layering on a number of extra themes and subplots in order to expand the source material to feature length.

The title comes from the New South Wales town which was relocated in the 1960's due to the damming of a nearby river, a move which left the site of the original town lying under a deep lake. This is the place that Irish former rally driver Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) relocated to some years ago with his wife Claire (Laura Linney), and it is he who discovers the body while fishing with three of his friends. When the group has returned home and the news about their finding has broken, a media circus blows up around them with the local community shocked by the callous nature of their act. Their decision even seems to take on racist overtones when it is revealed that the young girl is of Aboriginal descent, and the whole business puts an intolerable strain on Stewart and Claire's already shaky marriage.

[i]Jindabyne[/i] has been directed by Ray Lawrence, his first film since 2001's superb [i]Lantana[/i], and even though the film is classily made and superbly acted, it can't help feeling like something of a disappointment. The main problem here is the way Lawrence and screenwriter Beatrix Christian have chosen to stretch this film out to an excessive running time. There is a lot of extraneous material here which only detracts from the purity of Carver's original story. Using the buried town as a metaphor for hidden secrets and the ever-present shadow of the past, Lawrence imbues the film with a ghostly atmosphere which is personified by a creepy child (a very good Eva Lazzaro) who carries herself with a preternatural air; and the director also embellishes the material with a number of half-developed backstories for his characters, and a couple of ineffective red herrings which feel like cheap shots.

The one addition which really does work for the film is the decision to make the victim an Aboriginal girl, and Lawrence successfully exploits the racial tensions this factor brings to the film. It makes the men's decision to leave her floating face-down for a couple of days even more unpalatable given the suspicions and rituals with which death is associated in that culture, and the way Claire and Stewart find themselves excluded from the community - even as Claire tries to make amends - is skilfully depicted. The cast is also extremely strong with Byrne and Linney giving hugely impressive performances, and as in [i]Lantana[/i] Lawrence proves himself extremely adept at working with a large ensemble.

But despite the power which is present in a few of its individual scenes, [i]Jindabyne[/i] generally feels flaccid and unsatisfying, and all life seems to have seeped out of it by the time the two-hour mark has been and gone. [i]So Much Water So Close to Home[/i] is a brilliant piece of writing; a story so deceptively simple and rife with moral complexities that any attempt to augment it with some extra drama or tension is surely unnecessary. Robert Altman understood that when he played the tale straight and made it just one part of his wide-ranging jigsaw puzzle, but Lawrence's attempt to open out the story only dilutes its unique power, turning a potential firecracker into a cinematic damp squib.