Ray Pride

You've seen it all before.

But no, not truly. Critics often jibe that a story or plot is not fresh. I hate that. Time to leave the film festival bar to the serious drinkers and shallow thinkers. Because one person has seen permutations of a tale is no reason to presume someone else has. Critics see lots of movies, worse than the worst couch potatoes. (Perhaps I exaggerate.)

Karyn Kusama's "Girlfight" has made the festival circuit, from Sundance to Cannes to Toronto, garnering awards (two at Sundance, for best dramatic feature and direction), and it has sparked several fundamental forms of discussion, but it possesses an emotional ferocity, a narrative polish and an attentiveness to gesture and an actor's charisma that is rare and thrilling. You have not seen this film before.

Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez, in her first film) is a restless, streetwise high-school senior. She lives in a Red Hook, Brooklyn, housing project with her brother and single father. Her mother died in circumstances we only slowly learn about, a bit of psychologizing that is sketchier than the rest of the neatly implied narrative. Her brother's the family geek, but dad wants him to box. Diana wants to learn, too, but her father won't pay the tab. She starts her own regimen, then makes deals with the gym's trainer, and her secret training eventually leads to her transformation into the gym's first female victor. But just as she discovers herself as an athlete, and as an adult, she meets Adrian (Santiago Douglas), another young boxer, lithe, confident, handsome, kind, who, gulp, might just be a soul mate. (Despite the storyline and a character named Adrian, Kusama insists she has never seen all of "Rocky.")

Rodriguez plays Diana fierce and incendiary. Once an amateur, her performance in "Girlfight" is all-pro. She's the key find that puts the movie across. Her intensely knit, querulous brow and her softly husky voice are yet another emblem of the kismet of brilliant casting. Alternately angry and hopeful, Rodriguez's Diana is a performance you can't imagine another actor surpassing. Rodriguez simmers, explodes. She is the "young Brando" Kusama says her script required.

Kusama is a protege of John Sayles, and her work as writer-director in "Girlfight" suggests that veteran maverick's enterprises. Yet, while it would be easy (and wrong) to reduce "Girlfight" to "Rocky" retooled for young women, Kusama's debut plays as a jumpy, less didactic edition of Sayles' concerns. They share working class protagonists, earnest but unschooled, who talk, then perform themselves into a new understanding of themselves. The telling is taut and limber. Movies ineluctably suggest fate and destiny, because they're finite narratives. Is the ending happy, sappy, or tentative, perhaps only momentarily uplifting? To me, Diana's moments of happiness are hard-won, and as in real life, things grow more complex once the lights go up, and we return to life and the characters seep into our memory. Predestined endings are part of the stuff of myth, and in under two hours, redemption, or the spectacle of life or love or good intentions dashed will remain necessary and worthwhile subject matter.

Kusama's dialogue is never less than serviceable and usually playfully fresh in the mouths of her characters, even a line like "Oh please don't front me like a girlie-girl when you know I'm not!" And there are Saylesian jibes: "This neighborhood didn't catch on with the lawyer types." (To recognize one's place and how others are beyond it, and that perhaps you can be as well.) But then there is the trainer's grumble, "You don't sweat for me, you're out of my life." Or when her secret training is revealed to her best girlfriend at high school: "You. Are. Crazy!" There is a beat and then, celebration and assent: "My crazy friend!"

Diana even finds an absurd but wondrous love. What would be the weirdest thing to occur if amateur boxing allowed men and women to box? Love. There is a scene between Diana and Adrien in the ring that should not work but sings of the guileless racing of the heart: listen as Rodriguez rasps, "I love you, I really do." She is close enough to bite off Adrien's ear and when the clench breaks all they are supposed to do is batter, batter away at one another. Love? Fucking? Relationships? A death match, whichever it may be.

There are sneaky lifts throughout, ranging from Rodriguez' mad, rolled eyes, head down, gaze level, as if from Kubrick's "The Shining," or the dusky light of the beaten-down training gym, lit by fluorescence, building unexpected patches of background illumination that punch out of shallow gloom, similar to certain 1970s films, such as John Huston's downbeat boxing saga "Fat City." And the fights are simple and effective: whether by choice or budgetary constraints, Kusama does not estheticize the game.

Kusama's eclectic, impassioned, straightforward love story suggests a cool eye and a warm heart, and I hope she is a young Scorsese. She seems to have feelings for life as much as for movies. Fingers crossed.

(2000-09-28)

Also by Ray Pride

THE WHITE ALBUM
Writer-director Cameron Crowe has at least one infernal phrase to his credit: "Show me the money!," anyone?
(2000-09-14)

IN THE COMPANY OF RENEE
If "Nurse Betty" were directed by an unknown, its dark comedy and sunny-dispositioned star would probably make it a critics' favorite.
(2000-09-07)

VOICES CARRY
Let's say the first glory of Irish literature is the fact that a recognized artist doesn't pay any income tax. The second glory is the prose that flows free into the rest of the world.
(2000-08-24)

BENT
With a canny mix of the tasteless and the tasteful, the Chicago Underground Film Festival has matured into one of the most valuable and least predictable of local film festivals.
(2000-08-17)

KISSER OF MEN
(2000-08-17)

WINONA WEPT
(2000-08-17)

MULTIPLE PERSONALITY DISARRAY
(2000-08-03)

AMERICAN CUTIE
(2000-07-20)

EYEBALL KICKS
(2000-07-06)

HOLLYWOOD'S LONELY MAN
(2000-07-06)

RIDERS ON THE STORM
(2000-06-29)

MADE FOR WALKING
(2000-06-29)

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