MIFF Session 11: STONE TURTLE

Zahara, witnesses her sister's murder at her parents' hands and escapes with her niece, Nika, to the city where she tries to enrol the girl in school. She doesn't have the right paperwork, though, and must then take her back to the island where she lives. It's sparsely populated. The residents eke out a meagre living through fishing and selling rare turtle eggs on the black market. Samad, a scientist turns up one day, looking for just such a turtle. He pays her to guide him around the island. At one point he stops dead at the sight of his brother in the jungle, he is horrified. He suspects Zahara. Their confrontation ends in murder.

I've been this plotty in respect of this film's structure. This basic scenario repeats but details of it change. Zahara is aware of it, at first spooked by the deja vu but soon starts working with it. Threaded throughout is a folk tale about a turtle that violated an instruction and turned to stone. Zahara wrote her own ending which expands on the original and includes a crucial thought on memory. As the revenge narrative repeats and changes Zahara notices the effects of the actions of everyone involved in it and how the more she learns of the twists that led them to this point the harder each action becomes and the more extreme they need to be.

This plays with a quiet eeriness throughout which does not prepare you for some of the more extreme acts but the suggestion that we are heading for a resolution that might not be happy so much as complete. As it is dependent on repetition it can make a mere ninety-one minutes feel a lot longer, even as things speed up toward the end. Without the comedy of a Groundhog Day and murder being the probable end of every reiteration, this might drag self-destructively. What stops that from happening is the central performance by Asmara Abigail who leads us with a wide eyed artlessness toward a cozening survivalism to the softly desolate conclusion.

Seldom have the paradisical beaches of the Malay Penisula been used to so morbid effect on film. Where they might normally be the setting for mai tais by the waves they are here the scene of hand to mouth living and the threat of eternal death. It's not all bleak. Zahara's reading her extension of the turtle fable takes it to a poignant beauty which fills the screen with illustration style animation that might well get you welling up. A strange reminder of the closeness of eerieness and beauty.