It sounds like one of the biggest clichés in the book, but there really never has been a movie quite like Ten Canoes. A collaboration between iconoclastic Australian director Rolf de Heer (Bad Boy Bubby, Tracker), legendary Aborigine actor David Gulpilil (Walkabout, The Last Wave) and the villagers of Gulpilil's indigenous Ramingining community, Ten Canoes offers a fascinating yet utterly unpretentious tapestry of stories within stories. You might think of it as an Aboriginal Thousand and One Nights.
Gulpilil's mischievous narration binds the stories and guides us through them, recounting a tale incorporating sorcery, sibling rivalry, creation myths, kidnapping, tribal war and (just to give you the whole truth), a lot of sitting around and talking. The main parallel stories here involve two sets of warriors, existing a thousand years apart, both of whom have younger brothers who find themselves pining for forbidden female fruit. "It is a story not like your story," says our narrator, with elegant understatement, "but a good story all the same."
The film weaves its tales back and forth through the millennium (making skillful use of color and lush black and white to help us get our bearings), creating a fluid, nearly circular approximation of Aboriginal Dream Time. There are no clear beginnings and endings here, and the no-frills naturalism of the nonprofessional actors may take a bit of getting used to, but what we get here is a movie that will linger in the mind long after we've forgotten whatever it was we saw in the multiplex last month.
Ten Canoes (NR) Stars David Gulpilil, Peter Minygulul, Jamie Gulpilil, Richard Birrinbirrin and Crusoe Kurddal. Plays one night only, Friday, April 20, 7 p.m. in Miller Auditorium of Eckerd College, 4200 54th Ave. S. St. Petersburg. Admission is free and open to the public. For more information contact the Eckerd College Office of Communications at 727-864-7979. 4 stars
This article appears in Apr 18-24, 2007.