Love Island meets Lord of the Flies
The Raft 12A cert, 98 min ★★★★★ Dir Marcus Lindeen
It sounds like a pitch for an opportunistic Love Island spin-off:
10 strangers from every corner of the globe are set adrift across the Atlantic. They’re openly encouraged to fool around, even though most aren’t single, and the Svengali behind it all hopes to extract maximum friction from their confinement over three months at sea.
What’s astonishing is that all this happened in 1973, as part of a social experiment conducted by the late Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés. The voyage of the Acali, a custom-built raft, was widely reported at the time in tabloids, which dubbed it the “sex raft” after rumours of all the fraternisation on board. This wasn’t the ideal publicity sought by Genovés, whose intentions were to explore the dynamics of human conflict at a point when the Vietnam War was dragging itself to an exhausting conclusion: indeed, his absurdly hubristic goal was for the lessons of the Acali to end war for mankind.
It’s all splendid fruit for a documentary, especially given the remarkable filmed record of the expedition at the time, and the fact that seven of its members are still alive. Swedish director Marcus Lindeen, making his feature-length debut, had a full-size mock-up of the raft constructed, and invites the survivors on board this to reminisce, separately and together, about the time they spent on it.
All their most negative memories tend to centre on Genovés, who took to the role of being an on-board puppetmaster, with increasingly pushy fervour. He’d chosen his young volunteers to reflect a microcosm of the global population, and also for their attractiveness, proceeding from the assumption that sexual tensions would drive the men into peacocking competition, and from there into animosity.
But the experiment kept eluding his supposedly Big Brother-ish control. By giving all the most important duties on board to the women, he established a kind of benign matriarchy that was not destabilised, in the way he’d hoped, by the occasional flings they all indulged in. Blood on the boat, meanwhile, was spilled only once – the blood of a small shark, captured and bludgeoned in a Lord of the Flies moment that served as communal release.
Like most experiments of its kind, the Acali’s voyage reveals plenty that it wasn’t meant to, so much so that it became an exercise in overturning its own premise. The more Genovés tried to push it in particular directions, the more his participants rebelled against him, asserting their free will to co-exist quite happily. Lindeen’s account of it fascinates for all these reasons, and the reunions we see between these now-elderly voyagers have a very touching warmth and frankness. Refusing to be fodder for a lofty case study, they firmly take back control of their own story.