Mark Reviews Movies: MINDING THE GAP

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 30, 2018

Bing Liu moved to Rockford, Illinois, from China when he was a child. As his life progressed into his teenage years, he took up two hobbies: skateboarding and filming. With Minding the Gap, the first-time director at first merges those two passions, documenting the ways in which the lives of the filmmaker and two other skateboarders intertwined. They all lived in the same place, obviously. They all loved to skate, of course. They also came from homes that, like so many people in this city, were marked by financial insecurity and—more to the point of this fascinating, rich film—absent, inattentive, and/or abusive fathers.

None of this comes up near the beginning of the film, because such is the mentality that is born out of domestic violence. If it happens long enough and with enough frequency, it isn't abnormal. It's simply a way of life. There's no reason for Liu and his friends to discuss such matters, because nobody talks about the mundane routine of one's home life. When a father or stepfather's beating is an everyday occurrence, it simply becomes part of that unspoken routine.

Plus, there's skating to be done. The film does, indeed, begin with seemingly limited ambition, as Liu reaches back into countless hours of footage he has recorded from the past to show us how skateboarding has become a way of life for himself and his pals. The friends are Keire, whom we first meet when he's 17, and Zack, who is 23 and about to become a father when he's first introduced.

Liu mostly stays behind the camera. We catch glimpses of him during the montages from the past, as he tests his camera or sets it up to capture himself doing a few tricks on his board. Primarily, he clearly was and remains more fascinated by the complete control his fellow skaters have over their boards, their bodies, and the natural laws of physics. His camera darts along with Keire and Zack as they whiz down the streets of Rockford, jump on to and off of and over all sorts of things (stairs, curbs, and fire hydrants, to name a few), and repeatedly fall while trying to land a particular trick, only to get right back on the board to try again.

There's a genuine sense of freedom in these early scenes, and that freedom becomes both appropriate and ironic in hindsight. Before the three young men begin discussing the specifics of their lives, they occasionally state how skating gives them an opportunity to escape. It's akin to a drug, Keire says. It's all about the moment. It has to be, because any distraction could lead to a fall or an injury—or, even worse, a broken skateboard. The drug wears off, though, and that's when it all comes crashing down again. That's the irony of the freedom: All of these young men are trapped in prisons of economic insecurity and memories of the past.

The details of the men's lives come in spurts, because none of them really comprehends how similar his experiences are to those of his buddies. Liu noticed one similarity: They all left their homes as teenagers. Keire talks about the beatings he would receive from his father. Zack discusses how his parents seemed more liberal in their parenting when he was younger, until something clicked in his father—a need to be a "conservative American," which sounds like a code that Liu recognizes as the reason Zack ran away from home.

Liu recognizes it because his stepfather was abusive. He returns to his childhood home at one point, where his half-brother offers a tour of the places where Liu's stepfather would yell at and beat the two kids. The brother still closes the door behind him as a leaves a room. It's a reflex, because leaving a door open and letting out the precious heat was a reason to be beaten.

Watching the documentary is to see a floodgate of trauma and fear and insecurity open with little warning. Keire fears becoming stuck in Rockford, but he needs a job to help support his single mother (who, at one point, takes up a boyfriend who dictates that her time talking to Liu is finished). Through it all, he has to reconcile the abuse his father would give and the lessons he taught him about being black in America, about being a man, and about taking responsibility for one's decisions. His father died some years ago, and Keire recalls that day—not believing his mother when she told him, thinking that his dad was too strong to die, and only having the truth hit him when he saw his old man's dead body being pulled out on a stretcher.

Zack is convinced that he missed a few steps between childhood and adulthood, and now he has been thrust into the position of being a father. He and his girlfriend Nina have a troubled relationship, which seems quite ugly when the camera is on them—arguments littered with accusations and stinging insults. Liu later learns that it's even worse when the camera isn't on them, as Zack's friends and Nina herself explain that Zack becomes violent when he gets drunk, which is quite often.

We know about the cycle of such abuse. Keire's father told him that he only hit the boy because that's how he was raised, and with Zack, he is carrying on the mostly undeclared ways of his father. In Nina (and, to a degree, Keire's mother, with that new boyfriend), we see another cycle: how abused people latch on the good qualities of their abuser, because of their own need to be loved by a person whom they believe does or should love them.

As for Liu, he sets up an interview with his mother, which is shot with two cameras—one to show the mother and the other to capture Liu's reactions. Here, then, is a filmmaker who's willing to put his own story in front of us. It's not a matter of ego or anything selfish. It's because Minding the Gap is always telling his story, just as much as it's telling the stories of Keire, Zack, Nina, Keire's mother and father, and Liu's mother. It's a shared story of pain and, ultimately, hope, told with compassion and urgency.

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