Review: Freestyle

Freestyle

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Save the Last Dance, the 2001 film starring Julia Stiles, bore the template for the romantic inner-city drama, in which a stylized, syrupy Othello-Desdemona dynamic is set against the stacked-housing, grit, and violence of some impoverished ghetto terrain.

The main meat that hangs off the usually meagre and skeletal plot hangs, with an almost fetishistic slant, on some poor, seemingly defenseless white girl who, by some random miracle or tragedy--whichever shoe fits--finds herself surrounded by the threat of colour; yes, colour is what she fears, it is what her mother has explained to her as bieng the big bad wolf, the boogie man. And yet she goes, like moth to a lighter flame, going so far as to fall hopelessly in love with the wolf. Following the surprise commercial success of Save The Last Dance, countless--nearly countless--number of films in this same vein were hurried out, seemingly back to back; almost certainly to cash in on whatever zeitgeist that it had touched on. To my mind a frank list of a few of these films would look a little like this: Stick It, Step Up, Honey, 8 Mile--yes 8 Mile, crazy as it sounds; You Got Served, Stomp the Yard, Crazy/Beautiful... most of which have been very suspect; suspicious even to the laziest myopic eye. And Freestyle would appear, albiet on the surface, to be another in this highly embezzled vein.

Fresh face Lucy Stanhope-Bosumpin stars as Ondene; from the first flickers of image she's put on screen as the site of an impending crash site--as her mother nags on about her Oxford prospects, she stares longingly out at the group of street-ballers in their stainless creps and chiseled limbs, flexing out tricks that would confuse a mime. its clear that Ondene's biggest problem is her mother's expectations, but something else looms bitterly behind the scene, something that, for me, allows Freestyle to shake off most of my earlier Save The Last Dance condemnations, and that is that Ondene is not Desdemona; she is not the lilly white middle class girl who is suddenly faced with the other kind, instead she is black, and so the conflicts of the story are forced to play out on a less predictable and complex level. Interestingly, the wolf Ondene's mother warns her daughter about--the boy from the wrong side of the tracks--does not frighten her because he is different, or dangerous, but because he reminds her of her own self--about her own impoverished upbringing on an estate, something she wants her daughter never to experience and so pushes her to excel in upper-class realms, whilst still realizing that it might not be enough; at one point she says wrenchingly to daughter when she complains of the pressure -- "you know people like us have to be twice as good" And that sows the seed for the intricate (and largely pictorial) gender and race politics that is underlying throughout the film. For me this is Freestyle's biggest triumph. When Prunella, Ondene's nemesis, confronts her in a basket court leading up to the final freestyle show-down, she is not pissed off at Ondene for having more money than her, or for taking away her main fancy; she is angry because she believes that, despite Ondene being black, her lighter skin allows her automatic passport to better things--including money, and not excluding her main fancy. Prunella asks disparagingly: "Who do you see always in the videos, in the magazines," implying not darker skinned girls like her but Beyonce, Alesha Keys, Halle Berry, Aleisha Dixon, women with a passport like Ondene's--it is for this reason she cannot allow Ondene free passage into the one arena a girl with a shade like hers can prosper; it's for this Ondene cannot play the game her man lives for.

On top of all this a lot of the testosterone carriers are wayward--basketball freestylers who meet at like gunslingers at noon to bare their skills. Of course, Leon, the charming bad wolf, has every redeeming feature: outside of the court he studies diligently to enter university; he wants to become a sports writer, and in fact only enters the ever looming freestyle battle to pay his fees with the prize money; something he hides from his brother and friends because, again, they believe this path of betterment, of leaving the hood and essentially aspiring towards the middle-class, to be the bounty of sellouts and "white people". All this is touching on a truly prevalent belief system in the inner-cities, especially in the London post-codes where the film is set; something that has been exemplified in the increase in violence among the increasingly underachieving youth minorities. Yet despite all of freestyle profound leanings--leanings are all the really amount to. The deep subject matters are essential whispered through black holes in the plot and are never really seen through to any real conclusion: the girl gets her boy, the boy wins his prize, and yes it had to end like that but idea that the Save The Last Dance framings did clearly win out in the end grated on me, i have to say. That and the fact that the script at times seemed wooden, which in turn turned the characters in crucial scenes into botox dolls, ejecting wind-up sentences out of their stiffly parted mouths. And i suddenly remember how hyperactive the camera work had been, at times out-doing the freestyle ball-players with more flex, even more acrobatic posturing. But in the end i always let ideas win me over--good ambitious ideas--and Freesytle is full of very good, novel ones, albiet under-developed, yet they still engaged. One these i haven't mentioned is the film being the first to feature the highly present freestyle basketball scene in london, and to do so using an invigoratingly complementary soundtrack that takes full advantage of what the home-grown grime/dubsteo scene has to offer. For me Freestyle plays with what it is, what it seems to be, and evidently what it can be; and in way, in doing this, it has broadened the scope further for small british films that want to mine the same grounds it has touched on.