Mark Reviews Movies: SKATER GIRL

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 10, 2021

Director Manjari Makijany's debut feature isn't a documentary, although a key detail of Skater Girl makes us wonder if this particular story would have been better served as one. The story itself, which follows a group of children from an impoverished village in India as they learn to skateboard, is engaging and uplifting. The director's screenplay, co-written with her sister Vinati Makijany, tries to do a few too many things, though, and loses a sense of focus in the process.

The story revolves around young Prerna (newcomer Rachel Saacnhita Gupta, in a promising first performance), a girl who doesn't even know her own age, but it also puts a lot of attention on Jessica (Amy Maghera), a woman in her 30s from London, whose father originally came from the village where Prerna and her family live. In the end, it's Prerna's story that matters, so there's an odd disconnect in how much time we spend with the foreign visitor.

She's important, though, in that Jessica gives Prerna and the other kids in this village a chance to play, escape, and even dream for likely the first time in their lives. Prerna misses a lot of school, since she, who's at least of marrying age according to the local customs, has to work in the local market to make some money for the family. Her family comes from what would have been the lower caste in the time of that system, but these days, the family is still in that caste—but only according the unofficial, unspoken rules of society.

There are a lot of those, defining the way Prerna, her peers, and the adults of the village are expected to and feel obligated to behave. One of those standards is that Prerna must be loyal to and obedient of her father Mahesh (Anurag Arora), until the day—which may come soon, if the family's financial security becomes untenable—she becomes a loyal and obedient wife to a man chosen by her parents. That is what Prerna can expect for her life, and the most her mother Shanti (Swati Das) can offer is the hope that her daughter will end up as happy as she can be under the circumstances.

Into this arrives Jessica, who has come from London, awaiting word on a promotion at work, to see the place where her recently deceased father was born and lived for the first part of his life. He was adopted into a wealthier family after a factory fire killed his birth father (There's a bit of disingenuousness in the way the Makijanys' screenplay evades the misery and horror of the late father's story for the optimism and opportunity that resulted, and that is, in the big picture, the whole movie's goal). None of this ultimately matters, as Jessica visits her father's childhood home, showing Prerna an example of someone rising above his or her station in life (Again, ignore the facts of that story to get the message), while later getting and ignoring the promotion.

Jessica's here to make a difference—a little one that escalates into something bigger. Obviously, from the title, this change involves skateboarding. Prerna's little brother Ankush (Shafin Patel) rides around the village on something like a makeshift skateboard, so when Jessica's friend Erick (Jonathan Readwin), a teacher nearby, comes to visit, the kids are fascinated by the visiting newcomer's own, real skateboard. The two adults arrange for the parts for the local children to build their own boards, and suddenly, kids are riding and practicing tricks around the village. This, of course, causes a lot of annoyance and results in rules banning skateboarding everywhere.

This story isn't particularly special and is fairly predictable, but despite that, there is—well, as long as Jessica and Erick aren't the focus at the time—a solid sense of depicting the social norms, class issues, and personal struggles of this place. The act of skateboarding becomes a little rebellion of sorts for the kids, like Prerna's friendship with a boy from a higher caste and her own desire to make something—anything—of her life.

The part where fiction and actual reality merge, though, arrives when Jessica comes up with a plan to keep the kids' skateboarding dreams and joys alive. She designs a skate park, which would be the first of its kind in the state of Rajasthan, where the village is located, and with the help of Erick and his skateboarding pals, that plan is enacted.

There's footage here that can't be faked, as construction on the park unfolds, and the movie's final moments reveal that it wasn't. The filmmakers did build this structure in the real village of Khempur, which did become the first skate park in the state and, indeed, the largest in all of India. Watching that, we start thinking of all the real people affected by this project, all of dreams that may have been born, and all of the stories that could be told. As stronger as the fictional story becomes when Prerna finally takes the sole focus, it's little compared to all of these hypothetical, real-life stories.

One day, maybe those tales will be told. In the meantime, Skater Girl remains a shaky, unfocused drama, no matter how much good the movie's production may have done.

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