a stunning story that…

The main antagonists of the pieces are Jeff Baldwin, the festival’s head of entertainment and an obnoxiously loyal servant of the king, and Louie Migliaccio, who is best described as a “grown man who likes sugar-free energy drinks.” Jeff wants to maintain the park exactly as George envisioned, and not-so-subtly hints that he is the best person for the job; Louie wants to run the park as what it is, a business, and tries to get bank loans to buy it. George, for what it’s worth, keeps going on cute dates with 20-something goths, making them fill out a questionnaire about whether or not they’ve had breast enlargement surgery, and appears creepily drunk on his own mead.

However, there are two notable things about “Ren Faire” that make it worth watching: the woozy style and the incredible consent of the documentary’s subjects. It’s the second notable work from filmmaker Lance Oppenheim, who I’m sad to report is 28 years old, following 2020’s fantastic Some Kind of Heaven (about Florida’s The Villages retirement complex), and it feels feels like the arrival of a new and influential visual voice in documentary film. Shots play with color, light and lens blur – although the establishment of the Renaissance feel itself led me to write in my notes, “Why don’t we all live like that?” – and most importantly, leans into the fantasy weirdness of it all on, with staged and semi-staged scenes with talking lizards, vision quests and the subjects living out their thoughts and feelings without just saying: “Is this microphone turned on?” OK, so – “ a wall.

Produced by the Safdie Brothers’ Elara Pictures, “Ren Faire” has the same unsettling weirdness as last year’s “The Curse.” There are times when you don’t really know where it ends and the style begins: at one point I had to stop it and do a few searches to make sure it wasn’t actually an incredibly clever, over-watched script mockumentary – and This is something that I personally find “good and clever”, not “annoying, distracting”. This could be a little story in the middle of Texas: Instead, it turned my sense of reality upside down.

Documentaries have been hit and miss in recent years – the blockbuster success of Tiger King has made every weirdo think they’re just one quick soundbite away from mega-fame, and that’s done the genre a lot of damage. People behave strangely when a camera is pointed at them, then they soften and get used to it, and then – in the best documentaries, anyway – they quietly tell you the most devastating or crazy thing you’ve ever heard, and that all while watering their plants or something.

There are a lot of moments like this in Ren Faire – you see people losing their dream jobs, you see people talking about the “king” when he’s not there as if he could hear it anyway, you see them arguing and cheat and be deceived and prostrate yourself in a way that makes your whole body shudder. Then it’s awesome and I’ll watch everything that “Lance Oppenheim” kid does from now on. Thank you for the gift of this documentation, sir! Very good, very good!