Photographer, video artist and music video director Alma Har’el’s debut feature Bombay Beach – Best Word Documentary winner at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival – is a dreamily inventive film about a decaying town near Salton Sea in California.
The relic of a failed 1950s development boom, the Salton Sea is a saltwater lake bound by desert; a barren landscape that seems to symbolise the failure of the American Dream.
Har’el follows three protagonists whose personal circumstances amplify the sense of Bombay Beach as a place of both intense beauty and frustrated opportunity: Benny Parrish, a young boy with bipolar disorder, whose troubled soul and vivid imagination engender both suffering and joy for him and his loving family; CeeJay Thompson, an aspiring footballer, who’s seeking refuge in the area after witnessing his cousin’s murder in L.A. gangland; and Red, a former oil field worker in his 80s, divorced and estranged from his children, who lives in a trailer consuming whisky and cigarettes and espousing weird (and occasionally offensive) ideas. Together their stories form an evocative and symbolic portrait of American manhood and of a marginal, rural way of life.
Har’el has won praise for the unusually humane treatment of her film’s subjects. Neither exploited nor sanctified, Benny, CeeJay and Red speak for themselves; their stories amplified by abstract visual poetry and choreographed dance in this lyrical and moving film.
