7 Girls
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Thirty minutes of athletic, tan women fill the frame in 7 Girls, a documentary about female surfers. This road trip film follows a group of surfers around the Pacific Ocean as they surf Hawaii, Fiji, Tahiti, and Indonesia. The film conveys their enthusiasm for the sport, sense of humor, and their respect for nature. There are vignette interviews and moments of comedy. Most of the film is footage of surfing big waves found along the trip. A music track is run under the surfing footage.
[edit] Language
In modern American English, the word girls, (when used to describe adult women), is considered pejorative. One would never refer to seven female coworkers in an office as girls. But when women self-identify as girls, it becomes okay. The film suggests girls are women who are young and playful. The athlete's smiles, tans, and playful good humor support this.
[edit] Videography and surfing
The difficulty of surfing well and capturing it on video is considerable. It's tough for anyone to keep a surfer in-frame with the zoom at its limit and the wave batting the surfer in all directions. Some of the footage repeats in the film and there is about thirty minutes of documentary and a few more of interviews.
The person who goes fishing remembers the tangible cooler full of fish brought back. The hours driving, getting a license, wading, boating, and looking for that special location where the fish hide out are forgotten. With surfing, much of the surfer's time is occupied getting to places, waiting for good weather, lying on the board paddling out to waves, and waiting for a wave. The surfer faces weather, broken boards, ripped wet suits, death, and injuries. It looks like the experience of struggling and waiting is warped into the background when the surfer gets a spectacular ride on good-quality waves.
The DVD jacket says there are 56 Bikinis in the film. The scenery along Pacific shore is spectacular. There were tall curling waves with white-tipped business ends. There were panoramas of blue ocean to the horizon and white sandy beaches. Some of the scenes are not lit as well as a Hollywood feature film. Some appear to be shot on overcast days. As in most documentary films, the details are defined by the available light delivered at the whim of nature. The combination of extreme focal lengths, motion, and movement made the images hazy in some scenes. Even so, the non-surfing viewer still vicariously "gets" what's going on.
The film is about the surfing of talented surfers. In one scene, Sophia Mulanovich is riding a wave and suddenly changes direction. She moves as if her head were the fixed end of a pendulum and the rest of her body moved about its axis. At one point, she hangs off to the side, her back almost horizontal and parallel with the top of the board she is riding. From this way-off-balance position, somehow she rights herself and winds up once again in a balanced stance riding the board. While the wild ride is a product of physics, Mulanovich pulls what seems a magician's stunt in righting herself. Faced with the same conditions, most members of the human race would have been submerged in the Pacific.
[edit] Interviews
The interviews were revealing and fun but could have gone further. At one point, Keala Kennelly talks about being close to death in an incident where she was pushed into a reef by a wave. The viewer was primed and ready to hear more of what was going on under the blond hair on her head. What makes people risk surfing in a spot where it might be hours by aircraft to the nearest trauma center? Why is it worthwhile? Then she stops and the film cuts to something else.
The film closes with four of the women singing a song about human anatomy. They sing to the camera about big butts in a music video Karaoke-style.
