8 out of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Big River Yarn, or Darkness Invisible?
KinniburghKid from ,
19th January, 2010
It could just be a cultural thing (I'm British, they're Slovenian), but there is something staged and false about many of the interviews and long, moody looks in this documentary. That's a shame for there is no doubt Martin Strel is a 53 year old, wine drinking fat man who swam in the Amazon River for 70 odd days. Surely it’s Apocalypse Now without the guns and helicopters. What would be the need to embellish a fascinating story like that? I followed Martin Strel's swim day by day as he did it in 2007 via his son’s daily posts on the internet. The fascination then and now is why is this man doing it, what is going on in his head all those hours in the water and the even longer hours waiting between swims aboard a dodgy old boat moored amidst the rainforest? Strel is not an easy man to read. Or like. He drinks, thinks nothing of driving drunk, speeding and parks his car anywhere he likes. He's famous, we are told, so they let him get away with it. George Michael should be jealous, but it's only Strel's son who tells us of this celebrity amnesty. That's the same son who is filmed pretending to be his father for a radio interview, just one of the signals the film maker seems to be sending us not to trust the Strels. While Strel Jr is clearly a son deep in the shadow of his father, Strel Sr is fascinating. As well as swimming very long rivers and drinking a lot, he is also a flamenco guitar teacher. Such musical skill and expression hints at hide depths to this brut, the suggestion of some artistry, perhaps a Hemmingway-like character. Is he swimming because he can't communicate any other way? Is he risking his life in polluted rivers because you can't shoot big game any more? He never tells us, nor does his son's voice-over. The film, having started out seemingly holding up a light to their shallow, attention seeking ways, becomes darker and more enigmatic as it goes along. Just like the river, it gets deeper and wider the further he swims in it. About half way through I started to feel sorry for the film crew. They must have sensed a great human story they could document, but after weeks on a rusty boat in the jungle they came back with hours of footage of a barely monosyllabic fat bloke and had to make a movie out of it. But then, after it's over, despite my basic questions remaining unanswered, I find I'm still drawn to the subject, even keener to know the inner workings of this man who, consciously or not, starts off an enigma and ends even more of one. In that respect this film is the opposite of reality TV: Rather than see personalities striped bare for our entertainment, here we watch a man go(apparently) mad doing a (definitely) mad thing, but we are none the wiser as to why. Maybe Strel means enigma in Slovenian.
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