If you’re looking for something to stream that's a little off-kilter, you’d be hard-pressed to do better than a fever-dream of a documentary following a Scottish baron with sterling St. Louis bona fides around on an eight-day cruise.
Catch King of the Cruise by Dutch director Sophie Dros on Amazon or iTunes, and set sail with Baron Ronald Busch Reisinger. (Yes, those Busches—see Jeannette Cooperman’s delightful profile of the man and his history, including his links to St. Louis beer aristocracy, from a few years back.)
The doc, just over an hour long, paints a woozy picture of the carefully curated version of luxury aboard a commercial cruise line, and while it’s not an outright condemnation, it’s in the same wheelhouse as the smug bemusement of David Foster Wallace’s Shipping Out essay.
Watch as the baron gets an uncomfortable pedicure, discusses his weight and disappointing relationship with his mother, and fends off saucy innuendo from an aging Russian sexpot over birthday cake.
“I didn’t like the way it portrayed me,” Baron Reisinger says by phone from his summer retreat in Michigan.
(We learned of the film via an email from him.)
“The film itself is interesting in that the director had a point of view,” Reisinger allows. He wants the movie to succeed and wants you to watch it. Still, he says, “Her point of view was that cruise ships are boring and lonely, and that I am boring and I am lonely, and the reason I take cruises is that I am boring and lonely.”
While it’s true that the baron is cruising solo in the film, he says his wife and children often join him on cruises. Fatherhood, he answers with zero hesitation, has been his life’s greatest adventure.
He’s alone on this cruise because that was the director’s vision. He’s strolling the blazing hot deck in a baronial robe, he says, because the director asked him to.
“She didn’t show many people having fun,” he says. “There were thousands of people on that ship having fun!”
Despite not having his family with him, the baron said he enjoyed the voyage. After all, he’s the kind of gregarious fella who’s never really met a stranger. He says he loves cruising because there are thousands of people on board with whom to share his wealth of stories on his truly singular life.
“I’m an interesting human being,” he says. “I am an entertainment.”
Stories about elephant polo, anyone? No? How about crocodile wrestling? Ceremonial kingship of a small portion of Senegal? Yes, fine, we see at least half of one couple slink away during a baronial monologue at the bar, but mostly his fellow cruisers are happy to listen.
King of the Cruise is hardly the baron’s big debut, he says.
According to him, his first filmed appearance was footage of him stealing raspberries in 1946. He also says that in 1986 he starred in a feature (under his stage name of Jack Star Green) called Lizard Nightmares as Dr. Squamata, a psychiatrist treating a lizard menaced by dreams of his own murder.
Are they on IMBD? They are not, nor anywhere on the great big internet that I can find. But somehow I’m willing to take the baron at his word.
We can verify the genesis of King of the Cruise, though. A Dutch show from 2009 about cruises called Over de Reling (Dutch for “Over the Railing”) features the baron jocularly threatening death by tiny kilt knife in a Scottish accent. The director of King of the Cruise, he says, learned of him through a book about the show and decided he merited a feature all his own.
“It was a fun thing to do,” he says. “I would not have filmed it the way she filmed it, but I have great respect for her as a director.”
Watch the trailer for King of the Cruise below:
