Raoul Ruiz – Treasure Island (1985)

Review from The cinema of Raul Ruiz – Martin, Adrian – Australian Film Institute – 1993 – 10 pages – – bookle
Ruiz harboured for many years the dream of filming one of the novels of Robert Louis Stevenson – one of the ‘low culture’ writers he cites as having an important, formative influence on him. Treasure Island was set up as a four-hour adventure epic for Cannon Films, and shot in 1985. The film eventually surfaced six years later in a much reduced form.

Ruiz’s approach to the adaptation of Stevenson is far from conventional. ‘The way Stevenson tells the story is so remarkable that it could be about anything – pirates, kidnappers, whatever. We are surrounded by stories that are like houses that we can enter. We play amidst these stories, sometimes being involved in two or three of them at once.’ The film thus transforms Stevenson’s novel into a gigantic conspiracy, a ‘house of fiction’ that pre-exists those who enter into it. its stories constitute ‘the society in which we live,’ and they are observed by a boy still at the threshold of his socialized identity. Ruiz describes the film as being about the ‘games of simulacra’ and the ‘playing of roles.’

Gilbert Adair has called the film ‘the finest if equally the most bizarre, of the medium’s umpteen adaptations of Stevenson’s novel.’ Paul Willemen describes it as an exploration of ‘the world of late twentieth century story telling.’ Ruiz remarks: ‘Treasure Island is something of a synopsis, a trailer, or a “user’s manual” for my entire cinema.’