Bombay Beach Review: The Edge of Heaven

By Tom Day / February 1, 2012

rating: 4

Life on the poverty line in the American West isn€™t the first subject that springs to mind when one thinks about recent American cinema. In times of recession it seems the number one public policy in Hollywood is escapism or at least some level of distraction. But with the indie set having gone all €˜dark and grim€™ at this year€™s Sundance festival, establishing a mood more fitting for our times, it feels appropriate to be seeing a film like Bombay Beach rearing its head from last year€™s festival circuit, where it proved a surprising hit. Thankfully the film is not crushed under any weight of pitying self- importance, or indeed self-reflexive cries for social justice, it is more uniquely, a pleasant and enthralling hybrid of observance and expression, lending a fractured and washed up community a portrait defined by its beauty and people rather than its dirt and politics. Ostensibly the film follows three very different males, who reside in Bombay Beach, a small and insular town, whose namesake is the result of a flood at the turn of the last century. Red is the first inhabitant we meet, and its looks as though he has been here the longest, a grizzled, hardened man who grew up in the dust bowls of 1930s California, red now makes ends meet by buying cigarettes tax free from an Indian reservation and selling them on. His HD face is rendered beautifully along with rest of Bombay Beach by Alma Har€™el€™s nuanced and often poetic camera work. Now at the tail end of his twilight years Red offers us a peek into a breed of American that the dream forgot, €œSometimes I wonder where my next meal is coming from, I€™ve been like that my whole life... but I sure enjoyed it!€ he confesses early on in voice over (the slight but significant touch of never interviewing people directly lends the film much of its floating, montage effect.). Next we meet Benny Parish, a young resident who has spent his life in and out of foster care, thanks mainly to his dad€™s preferred hobby of blowing things up in the desert and spending some time in prison for forming dubious militias. Benny is Hyperactive and possibly bipolar, in one of the film€™s many segues away from pure observance, we are shown Benny in a choreographed dance sequence (hangovers from Har€™el€™s successful career as a music video director), Possessing boundless energy, and an inquisitive nature, if Red is the pessimistic old guard then Benny will be the future, though what form his fate will assume is uncertain. Perhaps optimism is best espoused by Ceejay, an ambitious black teenager who moved to the area recently form LA to escape his former community, which was dogged by gang violence and dead end opportunities. Ever hopeful of a collage football scholarship and luck in love, Ceejay forms a kind of buoyant centre in a barren and dethatched land bereft of opportunities. Which though shot through with aesthetic beauty seems rotten, especially for the young and the hopeful. This is not a documentary in the traditional sense; its form and style lend it more palpably to perhaps the essay film, or for the Malick inclined the tone poem. Har€™el€™s debut feature bears the marks of her past as a photographer; she clearly has a defined and robust aesthetic, but she has also weighed in, through careful observation and surreal touches, an acute account of life on the precipice of society. Whether here by choice or circumstance the inhabitants of this failed relic to social progress are treated not with pandering condescension, or as rhetorical tools in a political back and forth, they are shown in all their colours to be simply people, which makes a change. Bombay Beach is released in the UK on Friday. You can find a list of cinemas showing the film here... http://bombaybeachfilm.co.uk/screenings