A hearty endorsement from me this week, when the lauded-in-the-US-and-only-available-here-after-many-many-months three-parter Ren Faire comes to Sky Documentaries (Friday, 9pm). It is almost impossible to describe this show – in which a self-appointed “King” of the US’s longest-running renaissance fayre tries to find the right person to take over before he dies – without mentioning another HBO show in which an old man who pulses with impenetrable anger and weird horniness chooses someone to take over his job, and I have read a lot of coverage of it that hasn’t even tried. So I’m not going to, either: bit like Succession, isn’t it?
Ren Faire focuses on the power struggle beneath George Coulam, the octogenarian self-described visionary who created the Texas Renaissance festival in 1974. The festival only runs for six weeks a year, but in that time welcomes a half-million visitors and turns over millions of dollars. There are jesters and jousts and you can eat turkey drumsticks like they did in olden times. Men in steampunk-style hats say “my lord!” to you as you walk around and chide you for wearing modern fleeces. I don’t know how this makes millions of dollars either, but it does, and that’s why everyone wants a piece of it.
The chief piece-wanters are Jeff Baldwin, the festival’s head of entertainment and an almost disgustingly loyal servant of the king, and Louie Migliaccio, best described as “adult man who likes sugar-free energy drinks”. Jeff wants to maintain the park exactly as George envisioned it, and is not-so-subtly hinting that the best person to do that job is him; Louie wants to run the park as what it is, a business, and is trying to get the bank loans to buy it. George, for what it’s worth, keeps going on sugar-baby dates with mid-20s goths and makes them fill out a survey saying whether they have had breast augmentation surgery or not, and seems ghoulishly drunk on his own mead.
There are two notables about Ren Faire, though, that make it so worth your time: the woozy style of it, and the incredible buy-in from the documentary subjects. It’s the second notable work from film-maker Lance Oppenheim, who I am devastated to report is 28 years old, after 2020’s fantastic Some Kind of Heaven (about Florida retirement complex The Villages), and it feels like the arrival of a new and influential visual voice in documentary-making. Shots play with colour and light and lens blur – where the establishing of the renaissance fayre itself made me write in my notes “why don’t we all live like this?” – and crucially he leans in to the fantasy weirdness of it all, with staged and semi-staged scenes with talking lizards, vision quests, and the subjects acting out their thoughts and feelings without just saying “is this mic on? OK, so – ” in front of a wall.
Ren Faire is produced by the Safdie Brothers’ Elara Pictures, and it has the same disconcerting weirdness of 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 pause it and do a few searches to ensure this wasn’t, actually, an incredibly clever hyper-observed scripted mockumentary – and that is something I personally read as “good and smart” not “annoying, distracting”. This could be a small story in the middle of Texas: instead it turned my sense of reality upside down.
Documentary has been hit-and-miss the last few years – the blockbuster success of Tiger King has made every weirdo think they are one snappy soundbite away from mega-fame, and that has hurt the genre a lot. People act strangely when a camera is on them, then they soften and get used to it, and then – in the best documentaries, anyway – they quietly tell you the most devastating or deranged thing you’ve ever heard, all while watering their plants or something.
Ren Faire is full of moments like this – you see people lose their dream jobs, you see people talk about the “King” when he’s not there as if he might hear it anyway, you see them bicker and cheat and backstab and prostrate themselves in a way that makes your whole body cringe. It’s fantastic, then, and I will now be watching everything this “Lance Oppenheim” child makes from here on in. Thank you for the gift of this documentary, my liege! Very good sir, very good!
