Big River Man

Big River Man (Director: John Maringouin): Martin Strel is no Michael Phelps. The Slovenian endur­ance swimmer is 53 years old, for starters. He’s also fat and drinks two bottles of wine a day. But remark­ably, over the past ten years he’s swum some of the longest rivers in the world, including the Mississippi, the Danube, and the Yangtze. At the begin­ning of Big River Man, he’s pre­paring for his biggest chal­lenge yet, to swim the entire length of the mighty Amazon river; he’ll be taking time off from his day job as, believe it or not, a fla­menco guitar teacher and bringing along his friend and ama­teur river guide, a pro­fes­sional gam­bler from Wisconsin.

Though the Amazon swim is ostens­ibly under­taken as a charity pro­ject “to pro­tect the rain forest,” it soon becomes clear that there is no real sub­stance behind this jus­ti­fic­a­tion. Instead, the simple fact is that endur­ance swim­ming is both an obses­sion and a kind of therapy for Strel. Well, Strel never really says that. In fact, he rarely says much of any­thing. The entire film is nar­rated by his son Borut, his assistant, pub­li­cist and man­ager all rolled into one. Borut seems like a com­pletely normal fellow, except for his strange habit of speaking not only for his father, but in inter­views with the media, as Martin. He jus­ti­fies it by saying that he knows what kind of stories the media want. By the end of the film, though, I sus­pected that Borut nar­rates Martin’s story even when there are no cam­eras or micro­phones around. For such a mild-mannered lad, he has an incred­ible ability to spin myth­o­logy out of his father’s rather simple pursuit.

He tells us, for instance, that as a child, his father was beaten mer­ci­lessly by his own father and that his first long-distance swim in a river was actu­ally an attempt to escape a beating. For Martin Strel, it seems, swim­ming the world’s great rivers is a way to exor­cise his demons. Except that in the course of a 66-day swim, he seems to stir up more demons than he ban­ishes. As if dealing with dan­gerous cur­rents, piranhas, para­sites and the blis­tering sun weren’t enough, Martin begins losing his mind, even as his doctor begs him to abandon the swim before his heart gives out or he has a stroke. Strel presses on and the film enters sur­real ter­ritory. I was reminded of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo and a whole host of other explor­a­tions of mad­ness and the jungle. Director Maringouin uses music, sound and editing to great effect to convey Strel’s mental state. On sev­eral occa­sions, Strel swims away from the boat without noti­fying anyone, and on one occa­sion, Borut has to sweep the night­time horizon with flood­lights looking for his father. As we watch this very private man go ever deeper into him­self, we wonder not just if he’ll finish the swim, but whether he’ll recover his sanity. By Day 63, even Borut is refer­ring to him as a mon­ster and com­paring him to the Elephant Man.

Strel is a man of tre­mendous appet­ites and drive and is a fas­cin­ating char­acter no matter how you look at him. However, the fact that the whole story is told by his son Borut imme­di­ately made me uneasy. When it’s com­bined with Maringouin’s manip­u­lative (though highly accom­plished) film­making, I’m left with a strange feeling of being slightly had. It’s almost as if the phys­ical accom­plish­ment of the Amazon swim is pushed into the back­ground by both Borut and the dir­ector so that we can focus on the mad­ness instead. While the myth­o­logy makes for a better film, I almost feel like it dis­respects the man a little bit. Make no mis­take, though: this is a must-see.

P.S. To add even more to the sur­reality, the film was exec­utive pro­duced by Olivia Newton John. Yes, really.

Official web site of the film

(8/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs09, amazon, endurance, slovenia, sports, swimming