Tag: Sanoe Lake

To borrow an observation from my friend Liz, subculture movies are awesome. Well, they have a better chance of being awesome, and an excellent chance of being at least interesting. Focusing on people who build their lives and identities around an activity that many people never even have the chance to try is a pretty good starting point for a story. Passionate characters are interesting characters. Blue Crush credits itself as based on the article, “Life’s Swell” by Susan Orlean, about “the surf girls of Maui.” It’s more of an inspirational source for a loose adaptation, but I’m sure the studio was influenced by the line, “At various cultural moments, surfing has appeared as the embodiment of everything cool and wild and free; this is one of those moments. To be a girl surfer is even cooler, wilder, and more modern than being a guy surfer.”

To its credit, Blue Crush ignores Orlean’s notion that women surfers are “in a tough guy’s domain.” There are some surfer dude characters in the background, but they’re scenery (the way beach babes might be in a movie about male surfers). Anne Marie (Kate Bosworth) surfs with her two best friends/roommates/coworkers, Eden (Michelle Rodriguez) and Lena (Sanoe Lake). Eden dedicates herself to training Anne Marie for a competition at the North Shore’s Pipeline, sometimes angrily trying to push Anne Marie out of her self-doubt (she’s traumatized from nearly drowning while surfing at a previous competition). Anne Marie also is the primary caregiver for her younger sister Penny (Mika Boreem). Blue Crush mainly deals with personal problems rather than conflicts between social spheres. 

While it takes a sort of post-feminist approach to surfing, Blue Crush attempts to work in some subdued class commentary. The girls live in a trailer, drive a beater car, and eat convenience-store candy for breakfast. They work on the cleaning staff of a high-end hotel, getting glimpses into the materialistic and carefree lives of rich tourists. There’s an unfortunately overemphasized romantic subplot between Anne Marie and an NFL quarterback in for the Pro Bowl, wherein Anne Marie is ostracized by the WAGs who also mock him for his propensity for “slumming it” with local girls. While it is superficial and not very sophisticated, it is nice that Blue Crush at least ACKNOWLEDGES some of the class dynamics at play in Hawaii. [Of course, our protagonist is the white Kate Bosworth rather than her Hawaiian co-star Sanoe Lake, because Hollywood hates making movies about people of color.]

Which brings me to Blue Crush 2. This straight-to-video “sequel” is just another movie about surfer girls, with no connection to the original film other than someone paying for the rights to the title. Here we have another white girl protagonist, although this one has the opposite amount of class privilege. The first ten minutes of the film are devoted to clunky exposition establishing Dana (Sasha Jackson) as a) richer than chocolate cheesecake, b) spoiled as curdled milk. After a fight with her father she storms off from Beverly Hills to Durban, South Africa, to follow in her dead mother’s footsteps of surfing along South Africa’s Wild Coast. She makes a fast friend when she uses another young girl as a Scary Dude buffer. “I’ve never seen a white girl on the bus before,” says the new friend, Pushy (Elizabeth Mathis). “Well I’ve never seen a black girl who surfs.” Don’t worry, Dana, there won’t be any others in this movie. Or any other black PEOPLE, except that one same “Scary” Dude on the bus—seriously, the same guy, I was worried I was racistly confused but I guess they were trying to save on hiring actors by having THE SAME. EXACT. PERSON. a) “rudely” ask to sit next to Dana on the bus b) steal her things out of her beach locker c) menace her in a dance club d) POACH IVORY. I am not kidding about that last one.

In case you can’t tell, Blue Crush 2 is profoundly terrible. I was trying to figure out why I find it so execrable when I’m so fond of the original despite its flaws, wondering if it was just a matter of basic acting skill and production values. But there is more to it than that: Blue Crush 2 isn’t really about surfing. It’s about a privileged white American girl going to Africa to find her soul (Pushy actually tells her she is on an “uhambo” or “journey” for personal meaning). Dana doesn’t learn ANYTHING; she just experiences more. She visits Africa and leaves with photographs of her in the same places her white mother had been. She visits Pushy’s township and walks away with the experience of having shown everyone that a white girl can dance. She surfs Jeffrey’s Bay not for love of the surf but because it was her mother’s dream break. Blue Crush might inelegantly handle some of the race and class issues inherent to its story, but it’s a movie about SURFING, not a movie about how great it is for a rich white American girl to visit South Africa and happen to surf while she is there.