BYRON BAY INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: Bombay Beach is a desolate, barely there town in the southeast corner of California, a former holiday destination on the vast Salton Sea lake that now suggests a post-apocalyptic preview of where America is in part heading: children play in the ruins of deserted motels, dilapidated trailer homes huddle in ragged formations, and dead fish line the shore; the light at dusk is beautiful, as it transitions from orange rays to a pink shimmer, but you start to suspect it’s really a sign of further calamity.
This, in other words, is fertile ground for Israeli filmmaker and choreographer Alma Har’el, whose second feature is a documentary that catches the strange but ultimately moving rhythms of the lives being lived out in this location. The director sticks close to her three disparate protagonists – a young boy named Benny who is first seen loading up on medication such as Ritalin, ambitious high school football star CeeJay, and a shrunken, ageing relic of the industrial age named Red who traffics cigarettes to his fellow mobile home denizens – and lets them reveal their story to her instead of imposing one through editing and narrative.
Har’el has made an inventive, unpredictable documentary, one that can slip seamlessly from Malick-like reverie to flashes of choreographed performance. Short sequences featuring all three subjects and the people, both young and old, around them engaged in rhythmic movement or brief flushes of dance don’t just serve to give breadth to the characterisations, they’re a reminder how unexpected real life can be. Just as you’re convinced you can see a story forming, Bombay Beach tells you that far more is readily possible. Gradually, with quiet observations that broach uneasy truths, the movie undergoes a similar transformation. Red almost dies, and regains an ardor for life, while CeeJay proves to a focused, gentle young man in the making despite loss and provocation.
The rigour and distress of the locale – early on, as witnessed by CeeJay, a man curled up on the ground bleeding is told he might die without care and happily replies 'Thank God!" – slowly give way to a more nuanced outlook. There are still ruins, but signs of civilisation break the surface and you begin to appreciate the steady persistence of Benny’s mother (but also the latent rage within his father), or how CeeJay is dedicated to winning a college scholarship; there’s also a dog that looks like Yoda, which is reassuring for reasons not exactly clear.
What Har’el has done, in a documentary that requires a degree of faith on the audience’s part, is remake the harsh landscape of neorealism and temper it with flecks of magic realism. Bombay Beach could have been a post-Global Financial Crisis marker-point, a vision of a perpetually depressed future here now, but the mix of bitter truths, flights of fancy and spiritual generosity carries it beyond the obvious. What in descriptive terms might suggest a turn towards the outlandish or forced, actually proves to be a way of getting at life’s knotty truths.
Bombay Beach also screens at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image from Friday 6 to Monday 9 April.
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