Bombay Beach

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Bombay Beach
Directed by: Alma Har'el
2011

A surreal trip into the scraps of a broken dream. Poetic, poignant and amazingly musical.
Bombay Beach follows the parallel stories of three characters: Benny Parrish, a young kid affected by behavioural disorders; CeeJay Thompson, a teenager dreaming of college and football and Red, an old man lover of the desert. The film is set on the shores of the Salton Sea, in the Colorado Desert, one of Southern California poorest communities.
The setting is the core from which the magic of the film pulses. Built in the 1950s, Bombay Beach was launched as an attractive and modern tourist resort. Because of the lack of an outflow of waters, however, the natural balance of the Salton Sea changed rapidly, transforming a holiday paradise into an abandoned dump. What Bombay Beach captures is a site of broken dreams: dead fish, scraped holyday houses, stranded boats. Below the dust, among the rusty bits, and out of broken windows still eerily lingers the old promise of a perfect life.
But the lives portrayed are far from perfect; they are lives of struggle. The struggle of a mother to protect her son from his behavioural disorders, the struggle of a teenager to leave for college, the struggle of an old man to hang onto life in the place he loves most. What the film finally shows is how stubborn life is. Even in a place like Bombay Beach – remote, desolate and surreal – where apparently there is no reason to live, life still affirms itself. A mother does love her son, a teenager does hope to reach college, a man does succeed in outliving the desert.
Merging documentary shootings with a flavour of indie-rock music videos, Bombay Beach is a film unique in its genre. And the match couldn’t have been more contradictory and successful. Just when the scenes risk becoming too prosaic, director Alma Har’el resorts to landscapes, choreographies and close-ups to disintegrate the clinic look of documentation and introduce a dream-like world on the notes of Bob Dylan and Beirut. While respecting the report-like nature of the documentary genre, Bombay Beach seems to be a reflection on art itself: on its power to reveal, in its fictional nature, even more than what blunt reality does.
There is no place too surreal for men to live and stay. Bombay Beach stunningly builds a balance between bliss and threat, with every sequence walking on a thin rope between danger and liberation, hope and despair, unexpected beauty and hunting decay. Bombay Beach is a movie one of a kind and one not to be missed.
fiamma

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