Film Review 丨 "Skateboard Girl": Blood Dream Action

Text / Hong Xiaowen

Drop out of school, go to school, drop out of school again, take care of the housework, wait for marriage. This is the life of the protagonist of the movie "Skateboard Girl", Furina, in the village of Kimpoor in Rajasthan, India. Born and raised in Slovak, in this poor and backward village, Freina, like her mother, her grandmother, and her friends, seems to have been planned from birth, with no surprises and no changes, and "dreams" are even more out of reach.

Until one day, Jessica, from London, came to Kimpur to find the imprint of her father's childhood life, and changed all that. The British girl of Indian descent and her friend Eric brought colorful cool skateboards into the lives of the children in Kimpur Village by chance, just like throwing a stone into the calm lake, setting off ripples of interest and dreams in the hearts of the children in the village, and also allowing Vrina to see new possibilities in life.

However, Furina's skateboarding dreams are hampered. After taking skateboarding home for the first time, her father reprimanded her severely, accusing her of not doing housework but trying to participate in the "boys' movement", and then despite her personal wishes, he wanted to marry a man in a neighboring village who had never met, and also chose the wedding date on the day of the national skateboarding championship that Fulina had in mind. However, these difficulties did not stop Frina, but gave her greater determination. Faced with her father's opposition, she secretly got up in the middle of the night to go to the skateboarding venue to train; in the noise of the wedding greeting team, Furina ripped off her veil and wedding dress, and resolutely "escaped" to the tournament site with a skateboard, winning awards for herself and the opportunity to dominate her own destiny.

The most touching thing in the movie is the female friendship that Ferina gained on the road to her dreams, and several women of different ages and different cultural backgrounds have created a powerful force in supporting and understanding each other. When Furina could not see the hope of life, Jessica brought her skateboarding and dreams, and also gave her the courage to break the routine and dominate her own life; when Furina was grounded at home by her father, her sympathetic mother quietly encouraged and supported her to participate in skateboarding learning and training, telling her: "I am cowardly, but you are different from me"; when Jessica ran around to raise funds for the construction of the skateboard park but repeatedly ran into a wall, a local famous businesswoman agreed to provide land and construction funds. Just to let the village "make some changes"; at the skateboarding tournament, a girl who had just finished the competition saw Fulina rushing to the scene wearing slippers and took the initiative to take off her brand new skate shoes and lend them to her...

Perhaps to highlight the theme of female power, or perhaps because of the limitation of the length of the work and the creators want to express too many elements, the fly in the ointment is that the film's portrayal of other characters is somewhat hasty. For example, compared to the rich depiction of the mother's emotional and psychological changes, the father figure in the film is thin and flat. The father, who constantly obstructed Fulina from practicing and participating in the competition, and desperately forced her to drop out of school to get married, has been annoyed by his daughter's "deviance", but at the last moment he suddenly changed his attitude and was pleased with his daughter's wonderful performance in the competition. In the absence of pre-preparation and transition, in order to pursue a happy ending, the rigid reversal of the character logic not only fails to enrich the character image, but weakens the persuasiveness of the story.

Interestingly, in order to shoot this film, the producers spent 45 days to build a desert dolphin skate park in this small village in Rajasthan. This community skate park, designed to encourage girls to pursue their dreams, is the first skate park in Rajasthan and one of the largest in India, where hundreds of local children practice skateboarding every day.

In the movie, Jessica's crazy action of leading her friends to build a skateboarding site echoes the oasis-like skate park created by the creators outside the film on the desert, and the drama and reality are annotated with each other. The characters in the film come to life, and the residents near the shooting location and the audience who once watched the shooting scene also stepped onto the "stage" of the skate park. An introduction to the skate park at the end of the film makes us believe that the story in the film will continue beyond the camera.

Of course, the film still leaves us with many unanswered questions: what is the fate of these skateboard girls? Is the skate park created by a few dreamers just a blip utopia, or a new infrastructure for the community that can work sustainably? Can such changes really bring new opportunities in children's lives? Perhaps only time will tell. If possible, I'm looking forward to the fact that the people in the production team will observe and track the real story of this skate park for a long time, and maybe in ten or twenty years, we will see a documentary of the same name on the screen.

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