Review: The Raft Captures the Feeling of Life Under a Curious Dictatorship

Rather than a slice-of-life documentary, The Raft becomes a rather moving political parable.

The Raft
Photo: Metrograph Pictures

Described by its captain as a “tin box that wasn’t possible to maneuver,” the Acali set sail on a hundred-day voyage from the Canary Islands to Mexico in the summer of 1973. The raft was devoid of privacy, as its 11 inhabitants slept in the same room and went to the restroom in public (utilizing a hole built into a short plank). This was by the design of the Spanish-born Mexican anthropologist Santiago Genovés, whose area of study was violence. What causes it, and can it be cured? Genovés went to great lengths to ensure that the Acali’s closed quarters would result in conflict, and Marcus Lindeen’s The Raft shrewdly wastes no time in dismissing the man’s hypothesis, instead using Genovés’s experiment to scrutinize memory and capture the feeling of life under a very curious sort of dictatorship.

If a temporary, volunteer-dependent experiment in communal living during an era of “free love” seems like an awkward laboratory for a rigorous study of group tensions, only Genovés seems not to have noticed this. International press dubbed the Acali a “sex raft,” and Genovés’s volunteers, five men and six women, demonstrated little to no aptitude for quarreling. The scientist, whose journal entries are recited in a voiceover narrative by Daniel Giménez Cacho (again, after Lucrecia Martel’s Zama, offering a master class in delusional cuckoldry), is forced to attempt to engineer drama on an otherwise remarkably uneventful journey. He requires his research subjects to complete questionnaires about their petty grievances, and then recites their answers to the assembled group.

The film is actually set on two different rafts: the original Acali, which is seen in archival footage, and a wooden replica constructed (by production designer Simone Grau Roney) on an otherwise stark, black soundstage. There, the surviving passengers of the Acali reunite for the first time to discuss the project. Both settings suffer from a fundamental lack, as the archival footage of the Acali is mute (effects of lapping waves fill some of the gaps), and the reunion is incomplete after the deaths of four of the raft’s residents. (The lone surviving male member of the group is Eisuke Yamaki, a Japanese photographer who doesn’t participate in many of the recollections that make up the thematic substance of the documentary.)

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The film never gets around to explaining how the ethnically diverse group communicated with one another, but overall, Lindeen makes intelligent, surprising decisions to make up for the limitations of his project. Giménez Cacho’s narration of Genovés’s journals is a marvel, underlining the scientist’s grand ambitions as they devolve into the diabolical, impulsive acts of a harried reality TV producer. Among the many decisions Genovés made that backfired, his selection of women to hold nearly all positions of power on the Acali spectacularly upended his project. One was a doctor, another was a ship’s captain, and their actions not only saved lives but also contributed to the unwaveringly chill temperament of the journey.

Reassembled in their 60s and 70s, the women explicate a full but still fraught recollection of life under Genovés’s dictatorial stewardship. (One describes the document they signed before boarding the raft as a “slave contract,” and another decries Genovés’s “Gestapo methods.”) Rather than a slice-of-life documentary, The Raft becomes a rather moving political parable. Fé Seymour, an American and one of two black people on the Acali, recalls a moment of realization on the journey that the group is following the route of slave traders centuries ago. Passing over sunken ships and untold drowned bodies, Seymour tries to elucidate the feeling that “these people got to live again, through my body.”

This memory is all the more poignant because, as Seymour and other women attest, Genovés’s heavy hand prevented the members of the Acali from opening up and being their true selves with one another. Despite this, Lindeen respectfully emphasizes the differences of opinion that remain between the surviving women, some of whom think Genovés was a misogynist and others who reflect more nostalgically on their contribution to scientific discourse. With great subtlety, the director does a more thorough job capturing a heterogeneous portrait of responses to autocracy than the vast majority of the political discourse of today.

Score: 
 Director: Marcus Lindeen  Distributor: Metrograph Pictures  Running Time: 97 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2018

Christopher Gray

Christopher Gray is a film programmer at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. His writing has also appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes.

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