A film from Papua New Guinea is a pretty rare event. This was, indeed, the first commercial fiction feature that the country had ever produced. Naturally, it couldn’t be a very highly financed event; in fact it was produced for cinema release only in its home country, while in Europe it was marketed for TV and now a well-deserved French-produced DVD (which includes English subtitles, for those Anglophones not quite ready to adapt to pidgin. After an hour or so, you begin to realise that it’s much nearer English than it sounded at the beginning, but it’s still not exactly comprehensible. I’d love to know what its other formative influences are.) As is often the case with films from countries with very minor film industries, it turns to a quasi-neo-realist aesthetic. Nengo is one of the products of the ‘Ateliers Varan’, a globe-trotting offspring of Jean Rouch’s documentary course at Nanterre. The Atelier’s ethos was firmly anti-auteurist and stressed the responsibility of filmmaker to subject: and, like Zavattini, they favoured drawing stories from reality rather than imposing pre-written plots. Nengo’s film clearly puts a premium on recording his country in as much as possible of its variety, and using the contradictions of its streets and villages to create the incidents which drive the comic drama.

Perhaps it’s that wish to open the window as wide as possible, not knowing when the chance will arise again, which makes it almost a genre-characteristic that such films centre on vehicles. The ‘Tinpis’ (or ‘sardine tin’, you see how the language works?), is a battered rural taxi bought, and run, by a village chief looking for a new outlet and a happy-go-lucky friend of his daughter who saves his life one day and whom he promptly seeks to adopt as his son-in-law. Although both young people decline to have their life-stories written for them, the business partnership goes ahead; the old man and the young one acquire a car from a dodgy Australian who fatally underestimates his buyers, and proceed to run up and down the island and further afield – there is an enforced excursion to a tiny outlying island whose corrupt politician wants to prove to his constituents that he can ‘bring them development’ in the form of this ‘motor contraption (sic)’. They squabble, they irritate each other; the young man’s womanising ways are particularly embarrassing to his conservative partner, who soon develops a constant refrain of ‘thank heaven you didn’t marry my daughter’ even as the idea is beginning to appeal to both young people. And all the while constant rumours keep reaching them of war in their village in the Highlands, and the old man is itching to get back to his old tribal life and stick it to the neighbours. It is with this final confrontation, where the theatrical (but nonetheless destructive) village warfare turns into a serio-comic confrontation of old and new, that the film ends, and I was left with a distinct sense of having spent time in this place and seen a little of its life. Perhaps this is to some extent an illusion, given that the film is a co-production with considerable power in the hands of the co-producers, small though they may be in European terms, and the neo-realist truth to environment can be effective only up to a point. The old man is played by a man not so far from his character, but his daughter is from another part of the country, and in Papua New Guinea (over 800 languages on its territory, apparently) that counts for a lot. It was intriguing, though, and the story-telling is witty and varied. Rating: yes