Bombay Beach

Bombay Beach

It’s not often you see a musical documentary.  Not a music documentary, pampered rock stars squabbling their way through therapy, but a musical documentary.  Israeli filmmaker Alma Har’el has fashioned just that in Bombay Beach, a lyrical, sensuous hymn to a forgotten, decaying desert ghost town and the inhabitants who live their life in the margins.

If there’s such a thing as the American Dream, California’s Salton Sea is where it comes to die and Bombay Beach is where it’s corpse washes up.  A vast saline lake covering roughly 525 square miles of desert and sitting slap-bang on top of the San Andreas Fault, back in the ‘50s, the Salton Sea was marketed by real-estate developers as an affordable desert oasis, perfect for families who couldn’t afford the glitz of Palm Springs.

The reality however is a little less glamourous.  It’s a poverty-stricken landscape of decaying houses, rusting trailer parks, dead fish and empty bullet casings, populated by the lost, the outcasts, the casualties of the American Dream.

Focusing on a handful of characters; teenage football hero CJ, hyperactive youngster Benny and grizzled old-timer Red whose stories act as a loose narration, Har’el weaves a portrait of desolation and hope, part fever dream, part tonal poem, as she explores the lives and dreams of her subjects.

A strangely charming, world-weary, mildly racist, aging lothario and self-described “bum,” Red lives an almost hand-to-mouth existence cruising around the Salton Sea’s po’ white trash trailer parks on a quad bike, selling bootleg cigarettes. 

High school athlete CJ is the only inhabitant of the town who seems to have intentionally ended up by the banks of the Salton Sea (or has any chance of ever escaping).  A good student and talented football player on target for a college scholarship, CJ has fled the violence of inner city Los Angeles that has already claimed the life of his cousin and finds acceptance and love in the small community; entering into an inter-racial romance with his best buddy’s sister that is suffused with the sweetness, solemnity and dreamy longing of first love.

But the heart of the film is the Gummo-like bi-polar, hyperactive Benny Parrish.  The son of reformed gun-nut survivalists just out of prison, Benny’s a heartbreaking figure; an anxious, feral child who just wants to be a good boy, his uneducated ex-con parents, recently released after serving time on domestic terrorism charges, struggling to do their best for all their children and to provide the support and attention that their disturbed son needs.  The Parrish family may be dysfunctional but they’re not broken.  Poor and disadvantaged, their love binds them, ennobles them. 

Aided by an evocative soundtrack courtesy of alt-country rockers Beirut and grizzled folk hero Bob Dylan, Har’el’s film raises the everyday trials of her subjects to the mythic.  Red suffers a mild stroke, bounces back, still spitting out anecdotes and tales in his smoky cigarette and whiskey-ravaged voice.  CJ and his girlfriend deal with racial harassment at the hands of her ex.  Benny’s mother tours doctors with her son, trying to find the right combination of drugs that will allow her son to function and return to school.  The moment a Ritalin and Lithium-fogged Benny tells his teacher on the first day of school “I hope I behave,” is heartbreaking, his return a minor triumph. 

An impressionistic mix of almost voyeuristic observation and swooning musical and dance interludes, Bombay Beach is a sympathetic, affectionate portrait of a hard-scrabble community.  Suffused with bittersweet sadness and fragile joy, Bombay Beach is the most uplifting, genuinely affecting film most of you won’t see.  It’ll rip your heart out and make it soar.       

David Watson

Director

Alma Har’el

Produced by

Alma Har’el & Boaz Yakin

Starring

The Parrish Family, Dorran “Red” Forgy, CJ Thompson.

Country

USA

Music

Beiruit and Bob Dylan

Running time

80 minutes

Year

2011