SWIMMING WITH "BIG RIVER MAN"

With a huge bronze belly spilling over his tiny Speedo, Martin Strel looks like a Soviet gymnast gone to seed, or maybe a villain from a Tintin comic. “I’m going to do what no man has ever do,” announces the Slovenian endurance swimmer at the start of "Big River Man", a documentary by John Maringouin. At 53, he intends to swim the entire length of the Amazon River.

Such freneticism might be off-putting, but "Big River Man" keeps Martin appealing by telling his story from the perspective of his son, Borut. Devoted and articulate, Borut is Martin’s “head of logistics”. More crucially, he is the superego to Martin’s id. He's the one who urges Martin not to chug Jameson while doing the backstroke in Peru, who forces him to seek treatment for a subcutaneous larvae infection in his brain, and who confiscates bottles of dehydrating beer when Martin has second-degree sunburns.

This is not to say that Martin lacks discipline. Swimming the length of the Amazon–or the Mississippi, the Danube or the Yangtze, all of which he has done–is not possible without conditioning. To train, Martin swims an uninterrupted 50 to 60 miles per day at the Atlantis Club, Europe's largest indoor water club. His meal of champions? A horsemeat burger and two bottles of red wine.

Throughout the film the Amazon is heralded as the last untouched place on earth. To promote his 2007 adventure (and lure sponsors), Martin makes his swim a grand gesture about natural preservation and global warming. Maringouin obliges, offering images of virgin jungle juxtaposed with the demonic flames of slash-and-burn deforestation. Martin is cast as a sort of warrior, swimming his way through a paradise under threat.

But swimming the 3,274 miles of the Amazon nudges Martin towards bouts of lunacy. He spouts grandiose political rhetoric and confesses to defecating in his wetsuit. He plunges, unattended, into the river each night, only to be found naked and unresponsive by the crew's regular search parties. Borut admits that by the end of the journey, the crew no longer considered Martin human, but rather something closer to an animal, or even a monster.

The film's soundtrack is an odd mix of blues, opera, Tom Waits and the "Deliverance" theme, underscoring the hysterical monumentalism of the man and his adventure. "Big River Man" is exactly what a documentary should be–specific and universal, it is both a voyeuristic character study and a larger story about our collective strength and fragility in the face of extremes.

"Big River Man" is out on DVD in Britain on January 18th

~ ALICE GREGORY