Treasure Island

An ingenious, complex and very original film that repeatedly wrong-foots the viewer. What starts as a drama based on true events about the Second World War, filmed as a kind of homage to the achievements of Hollywood cinema in the forties, turns into a surrealist, psychosexual investigation of hidden desires. Frank and Samuel, two officers and superior code breakers stationed at the Treasure Island naval base, are ordered to create a fictitious identity for a corpse. Together with the body, fake letters and other personal documents will be dumped in the Pacific to mislead the Japanese. While writing the letters to and from the dead person, Frank and Samuel allow themselves to be led by Freud’s popular theories of the subconscious. But the deeper they dig into the fictional psyche of their corpse, the more they reveal about themselves. And also about the true nature of the American identity at the time of the Second World War. Their initial realism turns into a cinematographic portrayal of their inner selves, their fantasies and hallucinations. The letters they write seem to be more and more about their own lives. Slowly but surely they start to break their own codes, that served to hide their true nature – not just from others but, as will become clear, mainly from themselves.