With summer ending, at least here in Europe, the days growing shorter, the good old feeling of melancholy returns to our homes. It´s not so easy anymore to get up in the morning, staying at home – snug into a warm blanket, enjoying a cup of hot tea with a nice book or a Netflix binge – becomes a really fantastic prospect. Where we jumped full of energy just 2 months earlier from boat to jetty. Winter arrives. The cycle ends. Well, this is a movie right there which absolutely fits this light winter-depression.
„The Sailor“ is a 2021 documentary by Czech filmmaker Lucia Kasova. First things first: It takes place in the Caribbean, so watching the very first scenes of this movie – minutes without a single word even said – takes you to the warm, lush, quiet Island of Carriacou. An old, worn down ketch-rigged sailboat is moving gently on its anchor. An old man rows ashore in his old, worn down dinghy.
A man on his boat
The man, as we only slowly learn, is Paul Elring Johnson. Apparently, it´s clear from the very first scene, we meet him at his very last stage of life. Everything he does is a struggle. His movements are slow, but specific. Tremors, like his hands shaking – sometimes more, sometimes less, are the harbingers of what is to come. His body is worn down like the boat: Leatherlike skin, powerless movements.
Paul Johnson lives on his boat. After minutes without any word – a cinematic preposition that tells everything you have to know without text, without dialogue and without any narration – just by showing this man, his surroundings against the backdrop of the Island is ingenious. It sets the tone for the movie: Close, without intruding. Slow, paced according to our protagonist´s speed. And brutally honest. This is about a man looking back on his life.
Pioneer of Dinghy Sailing
Paul Elring Johnson lived a life only a few sailors can look back upon. Truly a life for boats. A life on boats. He is in his Eighties now, but back then when he was a young man, wanting to be freed of any societal shackles and even bonds to people, he started to sail around the world. In a small dinghy. Paul Eöring Johnson apparently was one, maybe the, pioneer of small boat sailing indeed. Not many know.
In a time when yachting was still an expensive sport of the priviliged, he mastered a life „just below the poverty line“, as he states at one point of the film. Just enough to live, just enough to do what he loves most. He sailed and lived on small boats and became a master boatbuilder, designing and building his yachts.
The more the movie runs, the more we learn. About a man who´s led a fascinating, rich, colorful life. A man who constructed, built and sold his yachts. Who became rich at some point and who led go of it all at another. After watching „The Sailor“ I googled a lot and found traces of him and his boats in the internet. Another learning after watching this movie: How fast your footsteps start to silt up.
What´s a man´s life?
So what is it then, a man´s life? This documentary tries to shed a light on this question. There is no commentary, no narrator. And in that, no judgement nor any subsumption. Very blunt, sometimes brutally honest, we get such an intimate insight in Paul Johnson´s life, his thoughts in retrospective, that it really hurts. Seeing this man literally getting lost in a modern day supermarket, like an alien. Or better, like a time traveller from long gone decades.
The daily struggle of Paul Johnson becomes synonymous with life. Paul is not a befuddled old salt living in the past. He is integrated quite nicely into the village´s life. People know him, love him. The little hatter here and there, a cigarette mooched or a cold beer killed, sitting down, contemplating the water, chatting about life. But we know, it´s ending though. He knows it.
When the night comes, Paul sits down, lights an old petrol lamp, openes the box of pictures. Like Pandora´s Box, containing haunting images. His wives. His children. We don´t know how many, he even doesn´t know. Girls, women, he loved many of them and as he assures, he truly loved them. Tremors getting heavier, to a point where his shaking hands make looking at these pictures impossible. A tear running down. At night.
A film like a Shakespearian tragedy
„The Sailor“ is one of the most touching films I´ve seen in years. It reminded me of „Chasing Bubbles“, which I also can recommend very, very much. But this movie is brilliantly composed, just like a classic tragedy. Recurring motives, like the feeding of the birds, John does every morning, up until one day they don´t show up any more. Or the build-up of tension with gale warningd and Hurricane preparations – a story arch that builds over the course of the film.
It´s so non-intrusive, never really damaging or invading the sphere of privacy – but creating an intimacy that is stunning. You can almost smell the scent of the boat´s interior, you can feel the sweet of the dry heat before the Hurricane hits. You get goosebumps and shivers, when watching this man looking back on his life. In tears as well as in joy and pride.
In this, the movie presents one possible answer to the mankind-old question of the meaning of life. To what is a „good“ life or a „bad“ life. What is wasted, what is useful. The Ying and the Yang. It´s a parable, deeply philosophic, not in a complicated, academic way, but in a very personal, close and intuitive way. I was deeply moved and touched, almost crying when eventually Paul sets sails on his old boat, his thin powerless arms on the tiller, gently gliding out to the sea. A last time. Maybe.
One of the best documentaries
If you haven´t watched „The Sailor“, you should do it. It´s a free documentary on YouTube, barely running 80 minutes. Take your time to watch it. It´s not your ordinary retrospective that piles up wild stories of storms and sailing adventures. It is more like a confession, a shrift. Sailing as blessing and curse. A rich life but an empty boat. A man who has seen and done everything – sitting in front of a box of fading pictures.
We all kid of want to live a life of sailing adventures. Cast off, let go all the lines to our shore-based life. Sever the connections, be free. Do what we want. Don´t we? What the price of such a life is, what remains, what stays, „The Sailor“ shows in such a beautiful, wonderfully filmed way. Truly one of the best documentaries I´ve seen in a long time. So, cuddle your favorite pillow, grab a tea or a hot chocolate – but with a good splash of Rum – and watch it. Paul would have loved this, I am sure.
My assessment of „The Sailor“ is 10 out of 10. Watch it!
Pictures © stills by Toxpro productions / Lucia Kasova
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