Big River Man (part of More 4’s ‘True Stories’, Tuesday) was one of the most gripping and brilliant, infuriating and disappointing documentaries I’ve ever seen.
Big River Man (part of More 4’s ‘True Stories’, Tuesday) was one of the most gripping and brilliant, infuriating and disappointing documentaries I’ve ever seen.
It was gripping and brilliant because the story it told with tremendous verve, wit, imagination and style was so extraordinary. Martin Strel, 55, a hideously overweight Slovenian drunkard and gambler, addicted to red wine and horse burgers, also happens to be the world’s greatest endurance swimmer. He’d already done the Danube, the Mississippi and the Yangtse. Now he was taking on the granddaddy of them all, the Amazon. Would he make it or would he keel over from a heart attack or get eaten by piranhas or be clunked over the head by a floating tree or fall victim to that terrible fish which swims up your urine stream into your willy then stays stuck there with its ghastly spines?
It was infuriating and disappointing because you could never be quite sure which bits were actually true and which were the result of editorial tricksiness. At the beginning, the clunky, hand-held camera shots, in which Strel, prompted by his son Borut, tried unsuccessfully over several takes to announce his plans in correct English, gave you the misleading impression that this was a sweet, home-made affair executed amateurishly by a couple of Slovenians and their dog. But the credits at the end were as long and lavish as you’d get for a high-budget feature film. You’d been entertained and enthralled all right. But had you also been had?
The scenes which first properly raised my suspicions were the ones near the end where an exhausted Strel is lying in the back of an ambulance, apparently suffering a cardiac arrest, as a trauma team struggles to revive him. We see Borut yelling in his ear. Words of comfort? No. Borut is trying to prime him with the words of the momentous speech he has written for his father in block capitals on a piece of cardboard and which he hopes his father will deliver at the finishing ceremony. Next there’s a shot of Borut being chucked out of the ambulance for being a nuisance. Cut to a close-up of Borut’s face pressed against the glass windows of the ambulance doors, peering in plaintively like Tiny Tim.
For me, that last bit was an artifice too far. Ambulances are not spacious places. Yet, somehow, a film crew — cameraman, soundman and director, presumably — were not only on hand to capture an (apparent) medical emergency but were also able to enjoy the luxury of being able to impose on it the kind of narrative slant you’d normally only get if this were a feature film and every shot had been storyboarded beforehand.
Storyboarded in this case, it very much felt, by Werner Herzog. Certainly, the true life story of a borderline insane man going right over the edge on a mad-fool quest up the Amazon seemed to owe an awful lot to the plot of Fitzcarraldo. With perhaps just a bit of Apocalypse Now thrown in, too. Strel’s other main sidekick — or so the film told us, though I’ve learnt since there was a support crew of 20 — was his earnest young American navigator who seemed to grow steadily barmier in sympathy with Strel, whom he believed was the world’s last superhero, a Christ-like figure suffering for our sins. A dead ringer, in other words, for the Dennis Hopper photographer who becomes Col Kurtz’s barmy acolyte.
Did all this artful disingenuousness matter? Well, not while I was watching it, no. In fact I enjoyed it very nearly as much as my all-time favourite documentary, Herzog’s Little Dieter Needs to Fly, because it was a story with much the same kind of appeal. An ordinary man, in the jungle, battles against apparently hopeless odds to emerge battered but triumphant. There was a fantastic back story too. Strel was raised by a brutal, alcoholic father who took out his self-hatred and sense of failure on his only son, who spent most of his childhood sleeping in the safety of a barn while his mother brought him clothes and food. One day to escape another beating Strel dived into a freezing river. His father followed him for miles down the bank but Strel had more stamina and swam to freedom. Every endurance swim he has done since, we were given to understand, has been his way of recapturing the joy of that moment.
It’s only now I look back on the documentary, 24 hours later, that I feel a slight sense of deflation and disappointment — as you do when you’re a kid (or more recently, if you’re as gullible as me) and some stranger spins you an amazing yarn and it’s only when you relate it to someone else that you realise you’ve probably been had.
I mean, of course, Martin Strel made his journey, that much is clear. (Though am I being picky when I quibble about his occasional use of flippers? On a Channel swim it would disqualify you, wouldn’t it?) But as to his mental and physical state when he did it, how close he came to failure, how much alcohol he consumed, how mad he and his crew really were, and so forth: for this you were almost entirely reliant on the exquisitely shot, carefully paced, scripted and choreographed, and quite outrageously manipulative work of director John Maringouin. And I’m not sure I trust the guy one inch.
Comments