As Camille desperately initiates herself into the group of boys, a seedy sense of danger creeps into every scene.
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All that love and loyalty can be weaponized, and for a spell the film’s mood becomes bleak. Moselle resists the urge to romanticize Camille’s stint as persona non grata, instead laying out the precariousness of friendship – oft portrayed in high drama on soap operas and HBO, rarely examined realistically. Conflict is where the film winces and where it wins. It is wearying to watch Camille foolishly, treasonably befriend Janay’s ex, Devon (Jaden Smith) despite knowing it will hurt her.
#SKATE KITCHEN MOVIE TIME HOW TO#
A fatal flaw in the structure of friend groups – whether communities or cliques – is that it’s easy to comprehend the role of comrade before understanding how to be a good person outside one’s social shelter. Surely buoyed by the fact the film’s characters are close in real life is how true these friendships feel, an authenticity ignited most hotly when they fight. (As much as Skate Kitchen calls gender roles into question, one doubts this could have been a film about young men.) What deepens them, and differentiates them from the alt-macho friendships between the film’s (mostly misogynistic) young men, is that Camille and her crew truly love one another, maternal in the absence of mothers. Male friendships were triangular in shape, and that allowed two men some version of intimacy.” The friendships in Skate Kitchen are bound by an exhilarated devotion to skating. In her 2015 memoir, Girl in a Band, musician Kim Gordon wrote that “ found some closeness by focusing on a third thing that wasn’t them: music, video games, golf, women. “I’ve always feared that, like you’re really tough for that.” (Kurt also, by request, inspects Janay’s vagina to assuage her insecurity, reassuring her that, “It’s perfect! It’s valid! You’re good!”) “Dude, that’s so scary,” Kurt (Nina Moran) tells her. She later confides the injury in her new friends, who grant her a sense of validation for the first time. When she sustains a gruesome pelvic injury – known as being “credit-carded” – at her home skate park, none of the boys who watched her fall so much as ask if she’s okay, leaving her to hobble alone to the hospital for stitches, skateboard in hand. The camaraderie Camille eventually finds does not come without first learning how awful people can be. Gradually, she becomes comfortable with her body and her board, moving where she pleases with a skateboard purring under her feet, timidity ever-dissolving as she whooshes through the world unafraid. When Camille has a falling out with her mom, she moves in with Janay (Dede Lovelace). They comfort each other through disclosures of sexual assault.
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They wear matching friendship bracelets and keep an eye on each other’s backpacks. Her fog of isolation lifts as the friends grow closer, nurturing each other while menacing the streets of New York. Moselle smartly juxtaposes Camille’s experiences of self-preservation and loneliness with those of being cared for. (Moselle first approached the women on the New York subway, where she saw them holding skateboards.) Before Camille finds the crew, she spends her days skating alone on her residential Long Island street and scrolling through Instagram from bed, gazing at photos of the Lower East Side vivacity she can’t quite get to.
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The sound of skateboards ardently hum beneath the feet of Camille (Rachelle Vinberg) and her pack with unbreakable continuity, the noise itself a roar of loyalty and protection, bruised and made well again in the New York City wilderness.Īlthough scripted, the film impressively stars real-life members of Skate Kitchen, a skateboarding collective co-founded by Vinberg and friends during the group’s high-school years. In director Crystal Moselle’s new film, Skate Kitchen, this constant sonant backdrop and its connotations of durability and dedication delineate more than just a symphony of nostalgia to my ears, they also provide a score for the magic and limits of friendship. The inquisitor seemed alarmed when I told him it was not rain or birds or waves, but a skateboard rolling on pavement, its wheels crunching the cracks in the sidewalk and the bumps in the road, smacking the ground upon landing then gliding away unbothered.
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I was recently asked by someone I’d just met what my favourite sound was.