Treasure Island (French: L'île au trésor) is a 1986 fabulist metafiction film directed by Chilean filmmaker Raúl Ruiz, which was screened in the Un Certain Regard section of the 1991 Cannes Film Festival.

[1] French, British and American companies funded Ruiz's obscure and complex adaptation of the classic 1883 coming-of-age adventure novel by Robert Louis Stevenson.

[2] Treasure Island stars a young Melvil Poupaud, a familiar face in Ruiz's filmography, alongside popular veteran actors such as Martin Landau, Anna Karina and Jean-Pierre Léaud.

The film's play on the traditional narrative of an iconic and frequently dramatized story is very representative of Ruiz' oneiric approach and style.

Ruiz takes his fondness for cartography to a new level with Stevenson's narrative, making the book into a map to the treasure in this rendition.

While tending to guests on the terrace, a strange blind man approaches the couple's son, Jonathan.

After fully regaining consciousness, Jonathan ventures to a cave where he can retreat for days at time.

He asks Jonathan to promise to read every book (all the treasure islands) carefully, because the entire fate of the western world depends on it.

The group eventually reaches another ship, where Silver and his crew are already there as hostages, along with Helen.

Silver goes on to explain that the whole world is playing a game that abides by sacred rules.

A man named Ben Gunn then explains that this game was a failure and that they will play again.

Jonathan agrees to play again, implying that he will be Jim Hawkins, and runs on the beach while the dead are being buried.

Ruiz is renowned for making complex stories, without following the traditional narrative structure.

These scripts are the society in which we live-…” ~Raúl Ruiz[5]These ideas are obvious towards the end of the film, when the game is introduced.

This philosophy of Ruiz' foreshadows role-playing gaming, which began to take off shortly after this film was made.

The idea that we are all playing a game, and are all different characters at points in our stories is one of the main themes of the movie.

The importance of cartography for Ruiz is not only his complex background as a Chilean exile, but in his reinvention of the way stories are told.

[6] In this film much time is spent developing the idea that even a familiar story can be told in many different ways