Tale well told

>> Ten Canoes is an imaginative and resounding story about aboriginal life in Northern Australia

by JEFFREY MALECKI

“A good story must have a proper telling,” states the narrator of Ten Canoes, a film that proclaims the vitality of classic storytelling, a refreshing anomaly in our irony-saturated age. A stunning and simple fable, and the first film to almost exclusively use Australian aboriginal languages, Ten Canoes is both a story particular to the Ramingining people and a wider human drama incorporating ancient Greek themes of hubris, corruption, wisdom, folly and death.

The narrator begins with “once upon a time,” combusts into good-natured laughter at the convention, and tentatively proceeds into a spiraling story of a band of natives hunting for geese eggs in a swamp, who in turn recount an ancestral tale that resonates with their own lives. The film becomes a multi-tiered echo chamber of narrative, but these levels are introduced and interwoven with such tact and humility that it’s never distracting.

Imaginative, hypothetical sub-stories fork out of the main story, and the narrator flits about, occasionally offering his interpretations. Throughout, humour pervades, from the affable narrator’s giggling to the bawdiness of the tribe. All of this is set against majestic shots that sweep across the serpentine waters or creep through the brush, and a soundtrack made up almost entirely of the creakings, rustlings and insect buzzings of the natural world. The pacing is measured, and an understated cinematographic sense gently leads the viewer through the narrative swamps as if in a handmade canoe.

There was some worry near the beginning that the film would lurch toward a sort of distanced National Geographic-style anthropological framing of other cultures. But these fears quickly become unfounded, and as the film progresses, one is quickly drawn into a compelling story full of realized and engaging characters: from the proud warrior Ridjimiraril (Crusoe Kurddal) dealing with his three bickering wives and his ingénue brother Dayindi (Jamie Gulpilil) to the just and pot-bellied Birinnbirinn (Richard Birrinbirrin) with his childlike penchant for honey.

There’s an unjaded honesty and underlying complexity in Ten Canoes, a moving human drama that gracefully embraces universal themes while simultaneously drawing out the beauty and difference of aboriginal culture, its mythology and the Northern Australian landscape.

Ten Canoes opens this
Friday, Aug. 24

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