Below Sea Level (2008)

User Rating:

8.1/10   

Director:

Gianfranco Rosi

Genre:

Documentary

Awards:

2 wins

Runtime:

110 min

Country:

USA | Italy

Language:

English

Color:

Color

art is long, but art is good

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

"Below Sea Level" got a standing ovation in Venice. At Cinéma du réel in Paris, it won the grand prize -- so of course it has to be panned in Variety. Jay Weissberg, like many reviewers, is trying to make a career for himself with a little provocation. And if that means talking crap about good films, so be it. (To read said provocation, go here: http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117938259.html?categoryid=31&cs=1#)

But "Below Sea Level" is more than good. It is so bristling with impossibilities the viewer loses all sense of where he his, or what his feet will touch when he stands up to go, or what kind of world he'll find when he's outside again. It is so rife with moments of unintended pathos, when we are intimate with something very strange, when we are lit by epiphanies we should have come to long ago, that leaving the movie theater, you only know that for those two hours at least you have lived something new.

"Post-beatnik down-and-outers," Mr. Weissberg? Gimme a break, and save these hyphenated hatefests for the hacks in Hollywood. The people Rosi has filmed have nothing to do with beatniks. They have nothing to do with post-beatniks. They have nothing to do with post-hippies or post-Cold War or post-coherent nitwits who string for Variety.

These are folks who have lost. They have lost homes, family members, incomes and community. They lost and got on four wheels and drove themselves down to Slab City, where almost everybody drinks himself to sleep. But this film is not about pity, and that's just one of its many strengths. Rosi shows us full human beings during a dark passage of their lives. He refuses to give us happy endings. He refuses to give us sad endings. We live something with his subjects and are left with the same questions that they must ask themselves, the questions that we must ask ourselves if we are awake. What kind of life is this? Is it worth living? What binds each of us to the world, and what would we do if we lost those ties?

What Mr. Weissberg calls "intrusive" is film-making of mind-blowing courage. Rosi has gone in and convinced these folks to share with him their solitudes, kindnesses and fly-infested campers, the rambling poetry of their long drunks and the clutter of desert life -- and we, his viewers, are the better for it.

A documentary like this is the work of a decade. A man has given years of his life to make it, and he has come out with something that few people who read these words have ever seen. Weissberg got a ticket and still didn't see it. But there is something deep and universal and human about "Below Sea Level" and the people it portrays, and the readers of Variety would do well to watch it, and judge for themselves. Who knows, maybe they'll be moving down to the slabs one of these days, too.