Everyone looks for their own paradise in Anca Damian’s often puzzling yet totally enjoyable new work of the imagination The Island, whose unleashed fantasy is heightened by the work of a top-drawer animation team. Inspired by a play by the late Romanian poet and dramatist Gellu Naum and a concert by the film’s leading voice actors Ada Milea and Alexander Balanescu, this musical fable relocates the lonely literary castaway Robinson Crusoe to an island of the mind, where Freudian feelings about mother overlap with African migration, environmental toxicity and the monstrous blank face of war and hunger.
With its catchy tunes recalling Philip Glass wrapped in repetitive modernist-minimalist verse and its candy-colored visuals that transform themselves in the blink of an eye, The Island can be mesmerizing to listen to and watch. But its deliberate lack of a linear narrative or even a clearly expressed theme is likely to put off casual viewers used to commercial animation. Festivals should be its main port of call, joining Damian’s previous features Marona’s Fantastic Tale and Crulic: The Path to Beyond, with many awards in sight through the telescope.
Although the 18th century writer Daniel Defoe may be more read these days for his harrowing London chronicle A Journal of the Plague Year, his adventure Robinson Crusoe is the first title that springs to mind when thinking “shipwrecked on a desert island”. Here Damian and her co-writer Augusto Zanovello construct a new type of castaway. Their Robinson (Balanescu) is an 81-year-old doctor with a thick mane of blond hair and round glasses, dressed monotonously in the same green Hawaiian shirt throughout the story. He has just been shipwrecked when the curtain rises, and he stares in dismay from the beach at the drowned bodies of his fellow passengers bobbing in the sea.
He sings “I’m alone” over and over, until it sounds like maybe a good thing, a way of isolating himself from others so he can indulge in his thoughts. He immediately starts a diary: “I write to remember my memories,” and uses a computer tablet which has miraculously survived the disaster to frame isolated parts of his new world, as though that was the only way to understand it.
But soon he is no longer alone. A sensuous green-haired mermaid whose tail is enveloped in plastic buckets (Cristina Juncu) ensnares him, though he’s too old or cerebral to do anything with her except beg her to remain faithful to him and be “alone, together”. His rival turns out to be his helper Friday, the only survivor of an overloaded boat full of migrants that has sunk. The title informs us “Robinson Saves Friday” but in the visuals he does no such thing: the doctor finds a young man washed up on the beach and scientifically takes a picture of him on his tablet. That’s the extent of his aid.
When he comes to, Friday (Lucian Ionescu) finds himself wrapped in a gold-colored thermal blanket by Robinson, who wants to teach him one word a day in exchange for being his servant-slave. Instead of rebelling, Friday throws himself into washing the doctor’s identical green shirts and serving him “safe drinking water” without being asked. We wonder how this character is going to develop. In the second half of the film, in fact, Friday turns into a super-hero sea captain who rescues hapless immigrants from the sea. But when they reach their safe haven, the “promised land made with the best intentions”, they find themselves herded into a pen-like labyrinth, under the surveillance of armed guards.
Far from being alone on the island, as he hoped, Robinson soon finds it overpopulated with NGOs and party-goers. He meets an interesting couple, the reformed pirate Pierre and his girlfriend Mary (Ada Milea). Mary instantly decides Robinson is her son (though he looks twice her age, he goes along with this wild idea because he enjoys calling her Mama). At this point, the visuals are over the top, with frames full of strange creatures like a Granny monster, a giant red machine with glasses that devours people, until it goes to war with an eclipse of the sun, and much, much more.
Balanescu and Milea’s music is almost non-stop, but so smoothly integrated into the story that it is never too much. The gently accented English dialogue is poetically rendered by the actors led by Balanescu, whose Robinson hovers between abstraction and reality, his illusions (like his belief that he is innately superior to Friday) a sad reflection on Western intellectuals.
Director, producer: Anca Damian
Screenplay: Anca Damian, Augusto Zanovello inspired by the play by Gellu Naum and the concert by Ada Milea, Alexander Balanescu
Cast: Ada Milea, Alexander Balanescu, Lucian Ionescu, Cristina Juncu
Art director: Gina Thorstensen
Editing: Dana Bunescu
Music: Alexander Balanescu, Ada Milea
Sound design: Gert Janssen
Production companies: Aparte Film in association with Komadoli Studio, Special Touch Studios, Take Five, Minds Meet, Amopix
World sales: Best Friend Forever
Venue: International Film Festival of Rotterdam (Big Screen competition)
In English
84 minutes
