SALON

Friday, Oct 14, 2011 12:00 AM UTC

Pick of the week: By the shores of California’s dead sea

Pick of the week: Docu-musical hybrid "Bombay Beach" captures life on the bottom rung of the American dream

By

Topics: Documentaries, Movies, Bombay Beach, California, Salton Sea,

Pick of the week: By the shores of California's dead sea

Anybody that’s ever seen the Salton Sea understands why writers, artists and filmmakers of a certain disposition are drawn to the place. A landlocked, increasingly saline inland sea in the Southern California desert, three hours or so east of Los Angeles, the Salton was created by accident early in the 20th century, when the Colorado River burst its canal gates. It’s one of the world’s largest inland seas located at one of the lowest points on the planet (more than 200 feet below sea level), and while it enjoyed a brief development boom in the years after World War II, today it presents a vision of almost unparalleled decrepitude and isolation, a post-apocalyptic landscape worthy of the late science-fiction pioneer J.G. Ballard. (By pure coincidence, reporter Evelyn Nieves visited the Salton Sea’s shores for a Salon cover story published earlier this week.)

“Bombay Beach,” the filmmaking debut of Israeli-born photographer and video artist Alma Har’el, was shot in that extraordinary and desolate place, but it isn’t the wry, sad documentary you might expect, about the historical rise and fall of the Salton Sea. (That movie exists, narrated by John Waters! It’s worth seeing: “Plagues & Pleasures of the Salton Sea.”) Har’el is after something much more difficult to quantify, a poetic blend of documentary and experimental film that will delight some viewers and drive others completely bats. In exploring the lives of three unconnected male Americans she finds living by the Salton Sea, in conditions of near-desperation, Har’el suggests that there’s a fundamental mystery and dignity to these people we will never otherwise know or notice.

It’s tempting to describe these three guys’ heartbreaking case histories with grand metaphor: three generations of the California dream, washed up on the shores of a dying lake! Youngest of them is Benny Parrish, a hyperactive 7-year-old whose parents are locally notorious ex-convicts, famous for their stockpiles of military hardware and explosives. While the Parrish household may leave something to be desired in terms of order, cleanliness, mealtimes, bedtimes and virtually every other aspect of civilized behavior, Benny’s parents unquestionably adore him and are doing what they can. Like zillions of other American kids, Benny has behavioral problems (and possibly a serious mental disorder) that is controlled with powerful pharmaceuticals that leave him tranked-out and drooling. He’s a cheerful and imaginative little buzzhead who’s had several of the most screwed-up things about our country land on him at once: crappy parenting plus crappy healthcare plus mind-altering drugs being handed out like Halloween candy plus the bizarre birth-lottery result of living in Bombay freakin’ Beach.

Har’el’s next subject is an African-American teenager named CeeJay, a relentlessly upbeat character who moved from South Central L.A. to his father’s house in Bombay Beach after his cousin was killed in a gang dispute. Living in the middle of nowhere is part of CeeJay’s master plan, which involves getting a football scholarship out of his nowheresville high school and then moving on to NFL stardom. It doesn’t much matter that the last chapter of that scenario is very unlikely, because CeeJay is a hard worker and a people-pleaser who should do fine. He’s dating his best friend’s sister — and fending off her manipulative ex-boyfriend’s sexting blackmail attempts — trying to push up his grades, talking to scouts from small colleges.

Last of all comes Red, a grouchy but seemingly indestructible octogenarian who lives in Slab City, the trailer-park encampment also found in Evelyn Nieves’ story for Salon. Red survives a stroke and gets back to his daily routine of bourbon and cigarettes. He makes extra money by reselling bootleg smokes from the Indian reservation to his trailer park neighbors, and even he admits that’s a little sad. Red has the racist views common to his generation — he wouldn’t approve of CeeJay and his white girlfriend, if he knew them — and doesn’t entirely seem to regret the fact that he’s got children he hasn’t seen in 50-odd years, and quite likely grandchildren and great-grandchildren he’ll never meet. He’s a genuine John Wayne and/or John Steinbeck American, bereft of introspection or sentimentality, pushing straight ahead into what’s left of his life with a terrible Zen implacability.

It takes a while for these portraits to emerge out of an 80-minute movie that follows no obvious linear track but unfolds in impressionistic and often achingly beautiful fragments, with a soundtrack that includes two Bob Dylan songs and several by Zach Condon of the band Beirut. You could certainly argue that Har’el drafts these three guys to star unpaid in a non-narrative video essay that may carry a certain resonance of authenticity among the culture consumers of New York and L.A., but really has no meaning for them. I don’t actually agree with that; even at its most choreographed and expressionistic — when Har’el has children dancing in the streets of Bombay Beach, a seaside hamlet of 300 people, or poses CeeJay and his girlfriend in white plastic Carnival masks — “Bombay Beach” feels infused with tremendous compassion, and paints a half-accidental portrait of life near the very bottom of the recessionary pyramid.

But here’s the thing: People may well read reviews like this one and decide that “Bombay Beach” sounds too weird and depressing and not go see it. But if Har’el had made a strict, rigorous cinéma-vérité documentary about the people unfortunate enough to live by the Salton Sea, nobody’d go see that either. So there we are: You either like this kind of ambitious, brave, borderless experiment or you don’t, and I think it’s absolutely magical and tragic. Maybe it took a foreign-born Jewish filmmaker to make a movie that seems so positively biblical — and even Christian, in an old-school, Sea of Galilee, sermons-in-the-desert sense of that word — about the current condition of America.

“Bombay Beach” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, and opens Oct. 21 at the Laemmle Sunset 5 in Los Angeles, with more cities and dates to follow.

Andrew O

More Andrew O'Hehir.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 4 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

vote
Kaitlyn Hunt refuses plea offer, will go to court over high school relationship - The 18-year-old rejected a deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest
174 points175 points | 124 comments
vote
Kaitlyn Hunt refuses plea offer, will go to court over high school relationship - The 18-year-old rejected a deal that would have labeled her a sex offender and placed her under house arrest
162 points163 points | 111 comments
vote
Ted Cruz against the world - How the Junior Senator is igniting the GOP civil war
84 points85 points | 21 comments
vote
Judge tells lesbian couple to separate or lose kids: "unmarried sexual relationships -- including straight ones – can be grounds for losing child custody"
36 points37 points | 3 comments
vote
Anonymous rallies behind Kaitlyn Hunt
23 points24 points | 26 comments

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations