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There are few things as calmingly enjoyable as the modest, closeup spectacle of an expert craftsman at work. Whether the trade is cooking or carpentry, watching them ply their trade with equal parts ease and intense
concentration is both gratifyingly instructional and escapist: a hands-off education in something you’ll never be able to do as well. “Boatbuilders” offers these pleasures in spades: Watching Luke Lorentzen’s warmly observational documentary, you may find yourself more mesmerized than you’d ever have expected to be by the incremental, piece-by-piece construction of a 56-foot luxury sailing yacht, made for a client in whom we couldn’t be less invested. It’s the craftsmen that carry “Boatbuilders”; their scuffed, gnarled hands make light work of it.
It comes as something of a surprise to find “Boatbuilders” — very much a documentarian’s documentary, in the granular, no-frills, process-focused spirit of Frederick Wiseman — nestled amid the flash and dazzle of the Venice Film Festival, a beneficiary of the program’s lately expanded and wide-ranging nonfiction out-of-competition section. Its overriding calm, of content and style, is a welcome respite in that context, though going forward, the film is likeliest to find a home with documentary-specific festivals and distributors: It will have its North American premiere as the opening film of the Camden docfest in Maine, a most suitable homecoming for a film set in a sleepy coastal nook of the Pine Tree State.
That would be the small harbor town of Brooklin — with a population of just 827 people — where the Brooklin Boat Yard is its defining institution. It’s a tightly-knit, entirely male-staffed company, and the film’s patient tracking of its long-term professional routines and rhythms brings it in line with Lorentzen’s previous documentary features “Midnight Family” (about the operation of a family-run private ambulance company in Mexico City) and Sundance prizewinner “A Still Small Voice” (about a chaplain’s year-long residency at a New York City hospital), though “Boatbuilders is a softer, lower-pressure affair. Not that the men are slackers: The punching of time cards punctuates sequences of them at work, and while the film’s timeline may seem languid as it follows the completion of a single project over the course of 16 months, it turns out that’s just how long artisanal work on this scale takes.
The yacht in question, named Kiandra, is a thing of beauty early on in the process, as the timber bones of her body are first shaped, planed and assembled into the mere skeleton of a nautical beast — each foundational piece, with its sweeping, sanded curves, resembles some manner of sculpture. Its slow growth into a gleaming, intricately detailed final product, painted a regal hunter green and worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, is a quiet, slow-burning thrill, whether or not you much care for sailing: It may just be a job, but the possessive pride that the men take in its creation is plain to see.
Lorentzen is more interested in the men as a collective than as individuals. We sporadically glimpse their non-working lives — in particular, that of project manager Trent, a sturdy sort expecting his first child with his wife — but it’s how they function, and occasional spar, as a team that gives the film its light narrative thrust. Boatyard chief Brian is a paternal leader, firm but fair, and caring even when it comes to the unpleasant business of firing an underperforming worker. Disputes are rare, however, and their style of communication generally taciturn and intuitive. When their client — a millionaire finance adviser worlds removed from the people of Brooklin — observes that the men are “like the ducks on the pond, super mellow on top and paddling furiously underwater,” he’s more correct than he knows.
When “Boatbuilders” zooms out, it’s to drink in the tranquil, rippling beauty of the landscape and the effects of seasonal change on this concentrated community — ice-fishing in the winter, lawn-mowing in the summer, an eventual, triumphant sailing regatta as fall approaches. The latter event gives this reflective, fine-grained film a kind of climax, but not dramatically so: It just puts a period on one project, before another that you know will proceed with the same assured regularity. “Boatbuilders” takes comfort in that breezy, unspectacular consistency, and so do we.
