The New York girls’ freedom is circumscribed by parental disapproval and the need for money, but also by the pressure of male sexual aggression, which ranges from annoyingly crude to dangerous (in one instance, the Skate Kitchen team rallies to protect one of their friends after she’s slipped a knock-out drug).Īs fresh as the female perspective is, as Skate Kitchen circles and swoops through the Manhattan twilight toward its conclusion, there is a sense of missed potential, that the film could have been much richer than it is. The film has a kinship with the 2014 French film, Girlhood, though without the latter’s emphasis on race and class.
After all, how many other female skateboarder movies are there? As expected, it celebrates women’s courage and athleticism, but also offers a lot of observant girl-group hang time, scenes with life discussions (including a long discussion about tampons) and partying. Skate Kitchen follows that template with a feminist orientation and its achievement is the fact that it exists at all. Another skateboard film from this year’s Sundance festival, Bing Liu’s prize-winning documentary Minding the Gap (shot over 12 years in his depressed Illinois home town), may be the genre’s best example to date. Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park (2007) set the standard for fiction. Like other skateboard movies, Skate Kitchen is about marginalized youth exploring courage, grace, collegiality and freedom in their low-cost sport. In the film’s key dramatic turn - which feels like a predicament from a Young Adult novel - Camille is ostracized by the other girls for a perceived betrayal.
Devon’s an amateur photographer and part of a crew of male skaters who the Skate Kitchen crew know and with whom they sometimes have run-ins. The Manhattan crew are led by the scrappy alpha dudette, Kurt ( Nina Moran), though Camille becomes close to Janay ( Dede Lovelace), and her warmly accepting family.Įventually, Camille leaves home to live with Janay, finds a store clerk job, and starts to spend time with a stock boy, Devon ( Jaden Smith, son of Will Smith). But Camille persists, taking the train into Manhattan where she meets up with other girls she has followed on social media. The depiction of Camille’s quest for freedom and identity feels narrow and constrained.The central figure is Camille ( Rachelle Vinberg), a regal eighteen-year old with long hair and oversized pale-framed glasses, who is cast as an outsider, a girl from Long Island who lives with her mother ( Elizabeth Rodriguez).Īfter Camille gets “credit carded” (a painful crotch injury by landing on the edge of the board), her mother insists she give up this dangerous-to-her-femininity sport. Vinberg is a wonderfully poised and thoughtful actor, and the entire cast holds the screen with spontaneous and focussed energy, but Moselle locks them into her sprawling story with short scenes that advance it as if on index cards. But Camille’s incipient relationship with Devon (Jaden Smith), a member of a rival-and aggressively misogynous-all-male skating group, soon threatens her new friendships. Camille (played by Rachelle Vinberg, the group’s founder) lives on Long Island with her mother (Elizabeth Rodriguez), who bars her from skating then Camille finds the Manhattan-centered group on social media, sneaks off to join it, makes her first close friends, and moves in with a member named Janay (Dede Lovelace). The director Crystal Moselle builds this drama, about an eighteen-year-old girl whose familial and sexual conflicts are intensified by her passion for skateboarding, around a real-life group of young female skaters.
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