A Certain Slant of Light

I feel that within the last couple years there’s been a minor (very minor) trend toward sympathetic movies about quote-unquote “bad girls,” girls who swear and smoke pot and have sex, and it’s not so much that the movie is a defense about why this behavior is acceptable as that the movie just doesn’t particularly care. That’s not where the locus of the story lies.

It might be too strong to call it a trend, even very minor trend, because at the moment only two movies are coming to mind: Augustine Frizzell’s Never Goin’ Back, one of my favorite movies in 2018, and now Crystal Moselle’s Skate Kitchen, which came out in 2018 though I missed it in theaters and only watched it a few days ago.

Skate Kitchen follows Camille, an isolated 18-year-old from Long Island who falls in with Skate Kitchen, a group of girl skateboarders in New York City. Camille’s already got the basic skateboarding skills: she’s not finding herself through a new hobby, but finding for the first time a sense of community, a feeling of belonging that has henceforth eluded her in her life.

(There’s a really moving quote about how Skate Kitchen has filled her sense of loneliness which I can’t find online. Should have taken notes.

ETA: asakiyume pointed out that this quote is in the trailer, so I snagged it there. Camille and her new friends lie in a circle in the grass and Camille tells them, “For a while, I was feeling really lonely, that loneliness that you have even in a crowded room. But I don’t feel it anymore.”)

Even as Camille grows closer to the girls there’s a sense of lingering awkwardness about her: she’s much more sheltered than her new friends, not comfortable talking about sex, initially unwilling to try the marijuana that the other girls pass around.

I was sort of expecting some polemic about this difference: Camille would dip her toes into this rebellious crew, then straighten up and fly right, or conversely the movie (and probably the members of Skate Kitchen) would suggest that she ought to the loosen up and live a little. But neither dynamic develops. The girls accept Camille as she is, just as they accept their member Ruby who rarely talks but carries a camera at all times. Camille does loosen up a little, but even to the end of the movie she wears her t-shirts tucked in and her jeans belted.

The movie’s large cast is at once its great strength - you really get the feeling that Camille has entered a whole social world, not just Skate Kitchen but the skateboarding crews of New York - but also its weakness: we meet so many people that there’s not a lot of time to develop most of them individuals. (Kind-hearted, foul-mouthed lesbian Kurt is a standout.)

But nonetheless the movie is distinctive and visually rich. I loved the skateboarding sequences, which are not slow-motion but feel somehow as if they were, with their sense of almost dreamy concentration, where nothing in the world matters but the characters trying to perfect a move - often failing, but getting back up and trying again.