Salton
Sea, a salt-water lake in the middle of the deserts of California, used to be
the place to be several decades ago. Nowadays, it stands as a testament as to
how time diffuses luster. The once pristine beaches that catered to the
wealthiest of Americans are now graves to thousands of fish that perish because
of the increasing salinity and toxicity of the lake. As it is, the area
surrounding Salton Sea is that post-apocalyptic paradise existing in this
pre-apocalyptic world. It remains to be this place of very elusive beauty,
where glistening during sunsets are masked by abject sights of poverty.
Alma
Har'el's Bombay Beach, without glossing over the pertinent issues
that surround the subject surroundings, focuses on the lives of several
individuals who seem to approximate the veiled charms of the place they call
home. The film is loosely structured in a way that it does not follow any
narrative arc but instead rides on an atmosphere of feel-good but never
doubtful sentimentality. As a collage of portraits of various lives struggling
in a presumably inhospitable landscape, Bombay
Beach is joyously uplifting, which is somewhat pleasantly strange in this current
cinematic landscape of popular doom and despair.
Music is
an important element of Bombay Beach.
The dances, mostly choreographed but performed by Har'el's subjects with hardly
any expectations of perfection, however, are essential. Volumes are
communicated when a hard-boiled old-timer delivers a graceful gesture of unlikely
romance in his awkward waltz, or when budding lovers interpret their newly
formed affair with an evocative number. Benny, youngest son of the Parrish
couple, whose story of being imprisoned for blowing up bombs in the desert as a
pastime is an extraordinary subject for another documentary, takes part in this
lovely group dance with other kids which summarize the endearing awkwardness of
his fateful existence in the community. In a wondrously edited, lovingly
executed and carefully directed sequence, the film transported its audience,
although temporarily, to a place where innocence in the midst of immense adversity
is not some lunatic's fantasy.
That Har-el was able to draw inspiration from people who would commonly be regarded as the dregs of society, as pinnacles of human hopelessness, and jokes of cruel destiny, and was able to visually manifest beauty from a place where it has long faded is evidence of her ability to mix heart with directorial mettle. It is that unrestrained but sincere optimistic depiction of the human spirit that makes Har'el's modestly produced but magnanimously crafted documentary such an indelible experience.
(Cross-published in Lessons from the School of Inattention.)