A (very) welcoming party celebrates Martin Strel’s marathon swim down the Amazon in the documentary Big River Man.
John Maringouin had no idea he would be witnessing one man's downriver journey into delirium. He thought he was filming a world-record attempt.
Back in 2002, the filmmaker happened to watch a small item on CNN about a Slovenian long-distance swimmer traversing the entire length of the Mississippi River. The swimmer, Martin Strel, is a middle-aged bear of a man, hardly a strapping athlete. And there was one fleeting image in the piece that caught Marigouin's eye: Strel was chugging a bottle of red wine after swimming.
"I thought, 'Wait!'" Maringouin remembers.
That spark of interest led Maringouin to embark on an physically exhausting, almost hallucinatory trip - ostensibly, Strel's 2007 attempt to swim the length of the Amazon River. Given that Marigouin's previous film, Running Stumbled , focused on his own estranged father's troubled life, the filmmaker says he wasn't interested in an infallible, Lance Armstrong-like character. And that's certainly not what he got as he filmed the documentary Big River Man , which won the cinematography award at Sundace this year.
Strel had experience swimming in parasitic, disease-ridden water. When he swam the length of the Yangtze River in 2004, it was so polluted that dead bodies sometimes floated past him in the water. It was so toxic that his blood had to be washed by doctors daily. Yet Strel plowed through, vowing never to attempt another difficult swim.
Soon after recovering from the Yangtze, though, Strel was planning his Amazon marathon - despite the crocodiles, piranha, myriad parasites and the notorious candiru fish.
As Strel's son Borut says in the film, which opens in Toronto this Friday, "the deadly candiru fish can swims [sic]up your penis. And if it does, no more penis."
In fact, the candiru's ability to swim up someone's uretha may be equal parts speculation and myth.
Such details are described bluntly by Borut, who acts as the film's easygoing narrator. But it's his father's downward psychological spiral during the Amazon swim, much more difficult to describe, that's the true core of Big River Man .
On the surface, Strel fashions himself as a benign goodwill ambassador, bringing attention to environmental destruction as he braves treacherous rivers with world-record swims. He is a celebrity in Slovenia, as well-known for his regular-guy machismo, his bit parts in films and his public appearances, as he is for his marathon swims.
"There's a vast difference between the Martin that walks on dry land and the Martin that does his [swimming]events. It's two completely different people," Maringouin says by phone from Los Angeles. "One is gregarious and available, and sort of a buffoon-ish self-promoter.
"Here's a guy who shows up at Guinness Book of World Records parties and walks up to people with his business card saying, 'I'm the guy who swam the Amazon.' But when he does [his swims] he becomes something else, becomes someone who gives everything to what he's doing."
Dangerously so. Maringouin records how Strel slips into near-psychosis during his 66-day Amazon swim. One minute he's being spoon-fed by his son; the next, he's violently attaching jumper cables to his wet hair in an attempt to fry out a subcutaneous larvae infection in his head. Even in the water with his wetsuit on, the 200-pound Strel downs a water bottle of alcohol. He fights hallucinations and demons the further downriver he goes, a one-man Apocalypse Now , swimming into dementia and disease.
Maringouin had been told by Strel's doctor that "with Slovenian men, especially when they are doing superhuman feats, the most insulting thing you can do is ask them how they feel."
So the director changed his strategy. Instead of getting diary-like comments from Strel, he recorded his subject's mental stress. Strel's disappearances into the night, swimming away from the expedition party, was bad enough for the crew. But scenes of Strel, paddling down river on his back, like a semi-submerged brute, holding a flower above the water, showed that something isn't quite right.
Strel isn't the only one who comes unhinged. The American amateur navigator on his support team - who admits he doesn't have a clue about river navigation - starts seeing everything through biblical metaphors. And the Peruvian and Brazilian welcoming parties in settlements and cities along the river do little to help ground the expedition team.
"Civilization was what really disturbed him," Maringouin says. "Here's a guy who wanted to be loved and adored and admired and prove something to himself. But the biggest problem was people ."
It wasn't the Amazon that caused his problems, says Maringouin. "The Amazon gave him life."