Treasure Island (Guillaume Brac, 2018) (Patreon)

I discovered French director Guillaume Brac several years ago when two very different cinephiles, director Dan Sallitt and producer / actress Roxane Mesquida, recommended his debut featurette A World Without Women to me on separate occasions. It was a good tip. The film showed a young director with a touch of Bresson's structural jones and a whole lot of Hong Sangsoo's sense of comedic gender miscommunication. 

I fell out of touch with Brac's work, but I was pleased to discover that his latest film Treasure Island was among the top ten on Cahiers de cinéma's 2018 year-end list. I'm not surprised that it's a good film. But I was surprised to discover it's a documentary. A multifaceted portrait of a private beach and water park outside of Paris, Treasure Island is a hybrid of sorts, clearly relying on reenactments and other performative gestures from its subjects. In fact, for the first 20 or so minutes, I thought it was a fiction film.

Brac structures the proceedings with one recurring conceit. Young kids are constantly trying to sneak into the park, either because they are too young to come in without parents, or they don't have the money for admission. So they try and lie their way past admission agents, wend their way through the woods, and even climb over the exits. They are caught every time, lending a sort of comic failure to the film but also emphasizing the bottom line of Treasure Island. This was once a free and open swimming hole, and now it has been fully privatized.

Much of the film consists of teens and young adults flirting and fucking around, (hardly) working their jobs at the park or sneaking into areas that are off-limits. In its open tribute to the kids of summer, Treasure Island is a lot like Adventureland, with the added wistfulness that these are real young people waxing semi-poetic about the need to have fun while they can. As the frequent cuts back to the company boardroom remind us, there's an adult world waiting, and it ain't pretty.