Ten Canoes Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

Visit to another world

This film gives a fascinating glimpse into a culture that is vastly different from our own - literally, 'another world'. Yet at the same time, the characters in the film come to life as real people, and one of the film's messages is that at all times and cultures, humans share common motives, wants and feelings. The Aboriginals in the story, including the ones who lived a thousand years ago, have a robust sense of humour and spend quite a lot of time laughing - at the same kinds of things that today's lads would laugh at. ('I won't walk at the back of this line any more'. 'Why?' 'Someone keeps on farting').

The structure of the screenplay is complex - it's a story within a story, within a story (the storyteller speaks in the 'now', and tells a story about his ancestors of several hundred years ago; one of them in turn tells a story to a younger guy, about some even more remote ancestors who lived .... who knows how many thousand years ago?) On top of that, some of the sequences are of imagined events, seen from different people's perspectives (same idea as in 'Rashomon'). Given this complexity, Rolf de Heer manages to tell the tale with great clarity. He uses colour-coding very interestingly to help this along: full colour for here-and-now and the way-back-then, black and white for the more recent lot of ancestors, and a kind of faded-out colour to signal imagined events.

Like some other reviewers, I'd suggest that you view the 'extra features' before the main movie. I found it useful to do this, because the interviews with de Heer and his Aboriginal colleagues helped me understand some of the motivations and story twists that I think would otherwise have been very obscure.

Overall, I'd say this is one to buy and to watch over and over again.

appalling

waste of time, money and effort