Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
"Girlfight" director Karyn Kusama pulls no punches when it comes to cinema.
Oct 5, 2000 | It has become a promotional clichi: Each new phenomenon from the world of independent film has an accompanying noble tale of a director who realized a unique vision only with the help and support of deep-pocketed friends, and whose feature debut inevitably sprouted from autobiographical roots. "Girlfight," the spunky story of a volatile, underclass teenage Latina who straightens out when she takes up boxing, fits the clichi -- and transcends it.
The film, the first from writer-director Karyn Kusama, shared the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in January. It soon generated tons of ink about the difficulties the director had raising the $1.3 million she needed to make the movie. Kusama, the daughter of a Japanese-American child psychiatrist and an educational psychologist, went through a period of teen anomie growing up in suburban St. Louis and at one point found herself at a boxing gym in New York.
When I spoke to Kusama by phone two weeks ago, she never once groused about the hardship of having to peddle a script. Of course, studios and boutique companies did balk at her project, and some of the moneymen indicated they would have preferred a film about a middle-class white gal. But in the end her mentors -- filmmaker John Sayles and his longtime partner in life and movies, producer Maggie Renzi -- pledged their financial support, and support from the Independent Film Channel followed.
Kusama resisted exaggerating autobiographical connections to her fictional story. Sure, she had sparred at Gleason's gym in Brooklyn in the early '90s, mostly to get in shape and take her mind off smoking. But her actual seminal experience was leaving the suburbs and finding her existential footing when she hit the pavement of New York. "The moment I touched city soil I was a goner," she told me. "I had always been painfully aware that the quiet and solitude of suburban life was not really for me." She attended New York University Film School as an undergraduate, entering in 1986. "Girlfight" has its "Rocky" elements, but it also stems from Kusama's affection for the gritty urban fables of Elia Kazan ("On the Waterfront") and Robert Rossen ("The Hustler") and the supercharged soap operas of that ultimate chick-flick director, Douglas Sirk ("Imitation of Life").
Kusama's appetite for dynamic melodrama and her knowledge of melodrama's need for galvanic acting energize "Girlfight." Kusama knows that the movie grows out of her star Michelle Rodriguez's eyes. Rodriguez's glance can transfix, seduce and kill -- sometimes all at once. The first close-up of her glower registers on audiences with all the shock of the bad guy shooting his gun at the camera in Edwin Porter's "The Great Train Robbery."
What grabbed you about boxing?
For me, it was the social dynamics in the gym: the alternate family that starts to emerge from boxing relationships. You see surrogate fathers and sons and even surrogate grandparents and grandchildren. The boxing gym is one of those rare places where you see old people who are being listened to and respected. It's almost an ideal of what the world should have been, or once was and is no longer -- where you could see life lived with decorum and a sense of ethics. There was a surprising politeness -- surprising because you do not find it in the outside world. I could see why so many young guys would take shelter in that space and feel safe there.
I felt that kind of safety in a pretty famous old gym called Gleason's, in Brooklyn. I kept looking at what was going on there and feeling so aware of these young guys who felt they needed protection. And that's what athletics can represent, especially in inner cities; that's why it becomes such an appealing second route for guys to take. But I began to wonder about these guys' female counterparts -- their sisters, mothers, girlfriends. Where did they get to go for this sense of safety? They don't get to go anywhere. It's just not as common to find that kind of place for women.
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