What if you got stuck in traffic and could never get out?  Ever?  You just need to turn, but no one is slowing down, you can’’t back up, and in the modern cityscape, there is no place to walk, no escape on foot.  Perhaps it’s just an urban nightmare, but has any city dweller not pictured it, however briefly, while sitting in a concrete parking lot?

Director Michael Lucas plays with that fear in Turn, a witty ten-minute surrealistic journey.  Ambitious Christine is going nowhere fast on the crowded roadways, so takes a short cut through a narrow alley, trying to get to work for an important presentation.  But harried Leo has already tried that alley, and after two hours of attempting to make the turn out of it that would put him on the main road, has given up.  With no sidewalks, and an unending stream of roaring cars zipping by only inches from the alley’’s exit, what are two people to do?

Metaphors run rampant: modern life as a frustrating and meaningless road that can often take us to places it’’d be better not to go to, the truly important things encompassed in a simple alley, an artistic portrait superimposed on a diagram representing the joys in life sometimes being able to burst through the clutter.  You can find themes and sub-themes and the cousin of your sister’’s best friend’’s themes- plenty to keep this picture coming back to your consciousness.  But this is no heavy message piece.  It is quick and funny.  You can take it on the simplest level and be well entertained.

While only two characters speak, and all but a few seconds takes place in a thin valley between nondescript buildings, Turn seems like an expansive film due to the deft camera work of Shing Fung Cheung.  The only claustrophobia is in the minds of the Christine and Leo.

Short films cannot bring us deeply developed complex characters; there isn’’t time.  The format, like that of the short story, is best at illuminating a single idea, event, or joke.  But within the limitations of time, Turn does a remarkable job of making Christine and Leo real. I know people like them and in some ways, I am like them.  That made their story richer, and their foibles funnier.

Turn was shot as part of the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) program, which has produced far more than its share of entertaining short films.  A year after Turn,  AFTRS put Peter Templeman, who is flawless as Leo, in the director’’s chair for The Saviour, which became an Academy Award nominee.