After a storm, a man is stranded on an island. He explores it and finds fruit to eat there. He falls into a rift of a cliff, but manages to escape through an underwater tunnel. He builds a raft to escape from the island, but is again and again destroyed by a red turtle under the sea. When the turtle appears on the beach, the man turns it over, but it transforms into a woman, and the two start a love affair. A son is born to them. A tsunami hits the island and destroys large chunks of the forest. The teenage son bids farewell to his parents and swims away from the island with three turtles. The man is old and dies, while the woman transforms back into a turtle and leaves the island.
Michael Dudok de Wit's "The Red Turtle" is a peculiar minimalist-ascetic art-film that contemplates about the bitter themes of fatalism and determinism. Filmed without any dialogue, it starts off as an ordinary Robinson Crusoe tale of a man stuck on an island and his attempts to escape from it, yet there is a plot twist in the middle that transforms the film into something more, an allegory on life. As unreachable as these events seem, they still talk about human life in general: people are born into a specific life, they try to escape from it, but realize that fate always stops them, and that everything is served to them, without much choice. The red turtle from the title is the personification of fate, a sort of Moirai: it destroys the man's raft, preventing him to escape from the island. The man is angry at the fate, curses and hits it, turning the turtle upside down, yet he cannot escape from it. The turtle transforms into a woman, his future wife, indicating how people do not even choose their love partners—life serves a partner to people, a specific look will attract specific partners, and they can either accept this or be stuck in loneliness. De Wit uses interesting cinematic techniques to illustrate some points: escapist dreams are filmed in black and white, to symbolize the futility of false hope; whereas almost all scenes are filmed in wide shots, to show how small humans are compared to the natural world and the Universe around them. Not much makes a difference whatever the man does, and he thus has to accept life as it is. The final scene is noteworthy, almost as if it shows how destiny itself has pity on the man, but is unable (or unwilling?) to do anything to give him a better life. The sour story hasn't got much enjoyment value, but it stimulates the viewers to think about how much actual control they have in life.
Grade:+++
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