Girl Loves Boy, Girl Loves Surfing

Rating: 5/10 (9 September 2015)

"Blue Crush" was not based upon a novel, a short story or a play but upon a non-fiction journalistic article ("Life's Swell" by Susan Orlean). This is not an unprecedented phenomenon- "Saturday Night Fever", for example, was also based upon such an article- but it is nevertheless an unusual one. Non-fiction is a highly important part of the publishing and broadcasting industries, but the same is not true of the cinema. There have been occasional exceptions ("March of the Penguins" being a recent one), but in general film-makers have taken the position that documentaries are something best left to television. So, despite its provenance, the story told in this film is a fictitious one. (As, of course, is the story told in "Saturday Night Fever").
The film's surfing sequences have been much praised, and rightly so. Like most Britons I have never tried surfing- weather conditions here are hardly conducive to it- but the exhilarating sequences in this film capture something of the sport's excitement and beauty and go some way towards explaining just why its devotees can get so fanatical about it. You cannot, however, make an entire feature film out of surfing sequences alone. (Well, you probably could, but you would have difficulty getting it shown anywhere except for a few art-house cinemas). So the film-makers had to come up with some sort of storyline to fit around them.
What they came up with is a sort of double love story, "girl loves boy" plus "girl loves surfing". The main character, Anne Marie, is a young woman living in Hawaii where she works as a hotel chambermaid. Her great ambition is to be a champion surfer and the film explores the story of how she fares when she enters a prestigious surfing competition, with a subplot about the progress of the relationship between Anne Marie and her boyfriend Matt, a professional footballer whom she meets while he is staying in her hotel.
Unfortunately, this plot is banal and uninteresting. It doesn't help that Kate Bosworth, who plays Anne Marie, gives such a poor performance; she mumbles so much that I had difficulty understanding a lot of what she is saying. The rest of the cast are not much better, except perhaps Matthew Davis as Matt; he may not be a great actor, but at least he speaks clearly and distinctly. Yet beneath the bland, feelgood plot there are hints of something deeper and more interesting struggling to get out. We hear of two traumatic events in Anne Marie's past, of how she nearly drowned during a previous competition and as a result abandoned the sport temporarily, and of how she was abandoned by her mother who ran off with a boyfriend. As a result Anne Marie has been forced to care for her younger sister Penny herself, with some help from her friends Eden and Lena. (Don't they have children's services in Hawaii?)
The trouble is that we merely hear about these events in retrospect. It might have been if they had actually been shown to us, possibly in flashback, which would have given us a more rounded picture of Anne Marie's personality and the forces which produced it. This would have made for a more interesting film, a story of a woman's triumph over adversity rather than a standard love story against a sporting background. Such a film would probably have needed a more accomplished actress than Bosworth in the main role, but it might have been more rewarding. 5/10. (3/10 for the film itself, with two bonus points for the surf scenes).