A RICHNESS BEYOND WORDS
Body language, emotions replace dialogue in this timeless tale, Chris Knight writes.
If you’re troubled by subtitles, this French film from Dutch writer/director/animator Michaël Dudok de Wit should please you. After the title card — La tortue rouge — not only are there no further subtitles, there’s no dialogue at all, in any language.
Even more amazing, neither the film’s characters nor enraptured audiences seem to miss it. When our unnamed protagonist washes up on the shore of a deserted island in the wake of a powerful storm, his subsequent emotions — wonder, fear, loneliness, curiosity, determination, even shame at one point — are all made abundantly clear by his body language and, in the rare close-up, the expression on his bearded face.
Perhaps he is stunned to silence by the scale and beauty of the nature that surrounds him. Past the wide, ecru beach where he first arrives lies a verdant bamboo forest with a fern floor, green on green. Beyond that, azure sky blending into sea, with no crack through which to escape.
He tries, building ever larger and sturdier rafts, which are destroyed by an apparently uncaring beast that eventually reveals itself to be a giant red sea turtle. When the reptile subsequently wanders up on shore, he flips it on its back in revenge, letting it lie there.
By and by, a woman appears. Her arrival is explained, after a fashion, but not in a way that makes any logical sense. You may choose to believe that she is one more hallucination — he’s had a few already — although from there you may also have to conclude that life is but a dream.
In any case, from the woman there follows, in time, a child. You’d think this might be occasion for someone to speak, but they continue their lives in a glorious, only-in-the-movies silence, disturbed by nothing other than the film’s ethereal score and a soundtrack of wind, waves and the occasional scuttling crab. (Those crabs, by the way, provide comic relief and may amuse young ones long enough for them to endure and ultimately even enjoy the film’s slow-paced 80 minutes.)
Adults will need no such diversions, able instead to drink in the movie’s rich, painterly colours.
The Red Turtle is an animated oddity — a Studio Ghibli production, with all the innocence, wonderment and attention to natural detail that entails, but not created by one of its Japanese co-founders or stable of animators.
Nonetheless, it fits perfectly into the company’s repertoire. This is a timeless tale that has no need to shout (or even speak) about how deliriously beautiful it is.