Treasure Island (1986)

 

Director: Raúl Ruiz

Screenplay: Raúl Ruiz

Based on the novel by Robert Lewis Stevenson

Cast: Melvil Poupaud as Jim Hawkins; Vic Tayback as Silver; Martin Landau as the Captain; Anna Karina as the Mother; Jean-Pierre Léaud as Midas; Sheila as Aunt Helen; Lou Castel as the Doctor / the Father; Jean-François Stévenin as Israel Hands (The Rat); Yves Afonso as  the French Captain; Tony Jessen as Ben Gunn

An Abstract Candidate

 

Don't hit a blind man if you want to find treasure. Let a blind man hit you.

Among the curiosities Cannon Group produced or/and released, they secured a film by Raúl Ruiz, in the midst of his glorious eighties era, adapting Robert Lewis Stevenson's legendary pirate novel. The film we received, likely acquired due to the cache the novel has, is one which would have not been suitable for a family audience, in spite of the amount of death in the source novel, and is one that would befuddle many. Ruiz however loved the author, so this subversion of the text is not to destroy it at all, his own drastic adaptation not an absurd project he ended up on, such as Cannon financing Jean-Luc Godard's King Lear (1987) where Godard completely went against the plan, but one Ruiz deliberately turned into the film it became.

It was a film too, mind, which he would come to revisit, the resulting production here fascinating as a mixtures of those who got involved with the film just in the cast - Martin Landau as the sea captain who visits our protagonist Jim Hawkins' home and begins the narrative, Anna Katrina as Jim Hawkins' mother, and Jean-Pierre Léaud as a mysterious writer following Hawkins as an outsider to the story itself. The dubbing adds to the strangeness to what is a film fully from this phantasmagorical era of Ruiz's career, set in the current day yet existing in a dream world. With the romantic music, of the tone not of a love story, at one point a constant in the early scenes, it feels unreal as we meet Jim Hawkins (Melvil Poupaud), a young boy living on an island at his parents' inn, only to be violently contrasted by the grimness of just content in the first act. This is not a film for the family as previously mentioned, for its tone and because this becomes a tale of a Jim Hawkins who, as a bystander, finds himself going through horrible events the adults play. As much as in the original novel, this includes the reoccurring theme for Ruiz of the menace of death. A blind man, as from the novel, signals the first outside threat when at first a sea captain (Landau) stays at the inn, leaving a glass eye as a threat. There is no innocence here, as before he even reaches Treasure Island, Jim will be traumatised by thugs raiding his home, being punished by them with belt shots, or his father's many staged suicide attempts finally succeeding.

But credit to Ruiz, his take on Treasure Island, whilst drastically altered and eventually a meta-textual interpretation fully retells the story in some new form, including nodding the source as a text within this world itself. It is an obsession for characters, the film eventually becoming a meta-dissection whilst reinterpreting the source, the adults actually playing out roles with Jim Hawkins a reluctant stand-in for this lead. It offers Long John Silver as Silver (Vic Tayback), the shoe maker who runs a Lebanese restaurant. Even if he makes a great omelette, done by using a syringe to extract the egg yolk, he is still the nefarious Silver, and this still involves ships and eventually getting to the titular island. The aspects which are entirely Ruiz stand out more as a result, torturing someone to know what their favourite song is, or this character believing all, regardless of virtue or sin, go to Heaven and thus a socialist.

Production wise, there is clearly the fact Treasure Island, if you attempted to film a faithful adaptation, would have been expensive, and there is the other fact that between Errol Flynn to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), pirates in cinema were not financially successful, in 1986 as well Roman Polanski's Pirates, as well as being a tumultuous production, was not a box office success at all as a big budget "proper" pirate film. Treasure Island is curious in its production companies as well, handled between Cannon Group, BFI Production, the film producing arm of the British Film Institute, our most significant institution in Britain for cinema, and Les Films du Passage, who produced other Ruiz films. None of them, even Cannon with their attempts to with the likes of Lifeforce (1985), were companies who specialised in big budget works either, so Ruiz's adaptation is as much improvised as throughout his career, shot in Senegal for a portion of the film, but changing galleons to modern ships and with the pirates their modern equivalents with assault rifles.

The sense of adventure is still there with only the edge of the morbid added. The compositions also stand out; shot by Acácio de Almeida, a regular collaborator at this point and prolific in Portuguese cinema, Treasure Island has Ruiz's trademarks of deep focus scenes (figures and objects like cats in the fore ground, characters in the background), and his vivid use of colour and lighting. Once we actually get to Treasure Island itself, the pace of the film fully, proudly, becomes its own spin of the source text as the meta-textual nature fully takes over, that this story and the character names are literally personas, for a game even with real casualties that has continued over many times. Arguments about game theory transpire over gun fire, whilst the one native on the island, the Ben Gun equivalent, has been using the treasure, diamonds in this world, as the perfect slingshot ammo. By the point of the finale, any question of wanting a faithful adaptation dissipates as this drastic reinterpretation of Robert Lewis Stevenson stands out as an admirable and strange adventure. Works of canonical legacy, especially when they enter the public domain, gain so much because the source text still exists proud of its virtues, with this one absolutely the case, and that the adaptations can vary so wildly with their own flourishes as the tale survives in multiple forms.

The first take of this tale I grew up with, with fond memories of, is a musical version with the Muppets and Tim Curry as Long John Silver, for Muppets Treasures Island (1996), and it is perversely appropriate that it can co-exist as Ruiz's, dimensions connected by the same text, even if Ruiz's has more cursing and significantly less Kermit the Frog. Ruiz's even takes its playful unrevealing of the reality into the oneiric, with a reoccurring obsession for Jim Hawkins being an action television show set in Africa the adults around him may be the stars of, which blurs the lines between what is real for him in the world, and what is staged and he needs to not take seriously for his safety. Sadly, even as a Cannon Group release, this has become obscure, Raúl Ruiz one of my favourite filmmakers still doomed to hazy VHS images even if appropriate for the sources, including if you find it with Spanish subtitles. It is a credit to Raul Ruiz that, in 1986 alone, he also released four others films, so Treasure Island even if an imperfect work was contrasted by the vast tableau of titles which came at the same time. It is telling he returned to this film, with the 2008 novel In Pursuit of Treasure Island, which in itself befits the project and his entire career, a text which can grow and change in new telling within another text.

Abstract Spectrum: Dreamlike/Eccentric

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low