Directed by Alma Har’el Club, QFT, Belfast, 80 min
“YOU’RE WITNESSING the birth of a city”. Kitschy Eisenhower-era commercials talk of “a miracle sea in the desert” and “the new recreational capital of the world”. Bombay Beach, one of California’s most impoverished addresses, has indeed come to represent the American Dream, but not in the way those early realtors and planners intended.
There are shades of recent hypno-docs Sleep Furiouslyand Le Quattro Voltein Israeli-born Alma Har'el's compelling documentary depiction of a faded utopia. Dereliction dictates a slower pace of life for Bombay Beach, a trailer- park ghost town where everything is hours away and the population is less than 300 oddballs. Children kick around abandoned beach houses and polluted watering holes. Hippies at the fag end of the trail roll joints. Adults nervously watch out for the sheriff: "We're not doing anything wrong and our house is clean."
They’re right to be vigilant. The Parrish family, we’re told, were taken in for munitions offences after 9/11. Their numerous kids were put into care and at least one of them, a lovely, high-spirited boy called Benjamin, still sports emotional bruises. Now back with his parents at the beach, Benjamin is shuttled between doctors, pharmacies and scripts for lithium and Ritalin. Mom looks duly baffled when a neurologist finds nothing wrong. But why have the doctors kept him on truckloads of Risperdal and Abilify? Why, indeed?
Up the road, an ancient philosopher and self-declared bum called Red travels around by dune buggy. The place is just too disparate to negotiate otherwise. Teenage football player Ceejay, lately arrived from South Central LA, has been dispatched to Bombay Beach to avoid the fate of a murdered cousin.
A soundtrack by Beirut and Bob Dylan provides a neat compliment as Har’el’s languid social rhythms evolve into mythologies and fantastic reveries. A mini-soap opera involving Ceejay and a bully-boy romantic rival escalates into a no-fooling dance routine. These careful contrivances between the film-maker and various subjects provide surreal happy endings and bring the entire community together.
It's only real in the way that Badlandsand George Washingtonare real. But the fiction is just too lovely to quibble about.
