Leave the Guys Back on the Beach

The first time I surfed I was 14. It was in San Diego, on my youngest brother’s board, and I was the only girl out there in the dark, choppy waves. I was not exactly surfing legend Lisa Andersen. I fell off a lot, lost the board almost constantly, drank gallons of saltwater. My brother pretended he didn’t know me. Still, I loved every exhausting, exhilarating second of it. I also rarely surfed again.

It wasn’t a matter of desire or ability. At 5-foot-3, I had the body of a small quarterback. Like my three older brothers who surfed, I loved the ocean, and had been body surfing since I could duck under the waves and hold my breath. The only thing inhibiting me was something I had no control over: my sex.

Girls, it was clear, did not surf. They sat on the beach watching guys perfect their cutbacks. The few girls I knew who broke this rigid cultural taboo got trashed. Surfing meant adventure and freedom. “Goin’ surfing,” my brothers would say laconically, as if that gave my parents any clue as to where they’d be. They could have been in Costa Rica for all we knew. When my brother Jim sped off in our Plymouth station wagon, his friends Greg and Tommy hanging out the windows, their nicked, heavy boards strapped on top, I knew I was losing out on a formative experience. Although I am a few decades older than when I stood on the sand at Ocean Beach, a teenage girl in a Hawaiian print bikini, surfing has never lost its allure for me.

So when I heard there was a movie about surfer girls coming out--a movie brought to the screen by avid surfer Brian Grazer--I felt this irrational urge to run outside and shout: “Surf’s up!” But the film, which opened Fridayturns out to be like a great wave you couldn’t quite catch--it’s a missed opportunity. While there is much to cheer in the arrival, at last, of a film that centers on young female athletes, particularly in a sport where women are incredulously still viewed as blathering sex objects, “Blue Crush” has one glaring flaw: It doesn’t know what it wants to be. Like its heroines, Anne Marie, Lena and Eden, who cruise from one surf break to the next in a banged-up old Chevy, “Blue Crush” has a meandering, drifty quality that undercuts its appeal.

Is it a coming-of-age story about a young woman’s struggle for identity in a macho world? A lush visual poem to a dangerous sport? A girl buddy movie with a feminist edge? Or--listen up, dudes--a chance to see some really hot chicks in really tiny bikinis (as those billboards everywhere suggest)? Or is it a slick, $25-million commercial for Billabong, whose clothes are paraded continually in the film and, like a leash to a wayward surfboard, tethered to the movie’s end?

For all the talk about “chick flicks”--a term that makes me cringe--there aren’t a lot of great movies about females this age. I was trying to think of the last good one I saw. Other than the light-hearted “Legally Blonde” and the haunting “Boys Don’t Cry,” which don’t really turn on female relationships, I had to go back 20 years to a story about another tough young woman athlete, Robert Towne’s “Personal Best.”

Unlike so many cultural images of female friendship, which cast girls as giggly bimbos or vindictive competitors, “Blue Crush” portrays young women in a sweet, genuine way. I loved the relationship of the female characters. When Anne Marie and her friends are teaching a bunch of big goofy football players to surf, laughing and hooting and having fun, it feels the way girls really act around each other.

When they help her train for a surf contest, swimming behind her in the sea-green water as she jogs on the ocean floor carrying a heavy stone, an exercise real big-wave surfers do to prolong the time they can hold their breath, it feels right too. The girls not only depend on each other to survive in a macho sport, but to put food on the table and cobble together the rent on their leaky shack. When Anne Marie is abruptly fired, her indignant friends threaten to quit too.

Although “Blue Crush” is a young person’s film (nearly everyone in it is under age 25), it might resonate with baby boomers, too. Watching the movie, I couldn’t help but be cast back to when I was 18 and sublimely carefree, living near the beach in a tiny apartment with my friends Theresa and Sue. Guys were important, but they weren’t the focus of our lives--we were. You can’t fake that kind of experience. And “Blue Crush,” with its affectionate portrait of female friendship, doesn’t. So why the dopey love interest? Our plucky heroine becomes smitten with an NFL quarterback and turns to him to make a crucial decision. Why does she need Mr. GQ? I thought, disgusted. And where did Lena and Eden suddenly go? Did they get chewed up out there on the razor-sharp reef? Fly to L.A. for the movie premiere? Or could it be this jock’s opinion is worth more than theirs?

In a movie supposedly about female empowerment and girls taking risks, I felt cheated. Except for a bleached blond and rail-thin Kate Bosworth, the actresses do look like surfers (although not nearly as buff as the professional surfers who do cameos in the film). Michelle Rodriguez, with her untamed dark hair, constant scowl and muscular arms, is positively fierce. Sanoe Lake, who is part Hawaiian and Japanese, actually grew up surfing.

“The one thing I really policed, I made sure these girls--not only could they surf, but their bodies looked like they could surf,” Grazer said.

He has a daughter who’s 14. When I asked what he hoped she would take away from the film, he said, “I guess, if you have a desire to do anything, even if it’s a sport, you should follow it. And that will give you the confidence to excel at other things.”

Girls may well be inspired by “Blue Crush.” There’s stunning footage of female pros Kate Skarratt and Keala Kennelly riding some of scariest, most beautiful waves on earth. When Kennelly roared down the face of a skyscraper-sized wave, disappearing inside a massive wall of foam and then shooting out the other end--still standing--I gasped.

And although big-wave rider Rochelle Ballard apparently did all the surfing for Bosworth, well, of course! Would you expect Matt Damon to surf like Kelly Slater if it were a guys’ surf flick?

For girls like my 9-year-old daughter, who pops up on her body board now in anticipation of the day she surfs, who could benefit from more films with strong female characters to counter the relentless tide of cultural dreck, “Blue Crush” is worth the price of admission.

But next time you want to make a movie about independent young women, leave the guys on the beach.

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Former surfer Mona Gable is a freelance writer who rides the waves these days vicariously through her family.