It’s that recognition of a common trait or interest which makes us feel less alone: I see you, I recognise myself in you, there are others like me. Finding a piece of ourselves in someone else helps develop our identity. This is easier to do when there is someone to look to, to help forge a path. As high school comes to an end, teens are expected to make major decisions about who they are going to become, what the future will hold, what they will do with their lives. Posters and images of people we admire line bedrooms walls and fill our lock screens as examples of people we can become. Searching for idols that represent you is an integral part of the adolescent experience. And New York looks beautiful without being prettified, with its mixed-up mobs of humans, especially fine to see in this global time out - a playground, Eden with graffiti.This review is published in partnership with Melbourne International Film Festival’s Critics Campus program. The strength of “Betty” is not in its plotted moments but its more existential ones, evocative of an age when small things can seem terribly important and big things too far off to think about, when time is boundless and space a place to be skated. There is a night in jail, a #MeToo narrative that tests a friendship, a misadventure in modeling. There are small betrayals, of the sort people make when they can’t think on their feet there is romance, of a highly tentative sort. We get brief glimpses of some characters’ home lives, of a disapproving parent or two, but they are largely beside the point. The more obviously plot-driven scenes can feel a little awkward, but awkwardness in this context is not unappealing it only makes the endeavor feel that much more earnest and authentic. It feels improvised much of the time - not as in comedy or theater but humans navigating life as it comes at them, just as they navigate the traffic on crowded city streets.
Moselle’s previous film, “The Wolfpack” (2015), about a group of brothers who had grown up confined to their apartment and knew the world mostly through movies, was a documentary, and “Betty,” even when it turns on the slo-mo or turns up the music, has a lifelike flow.
SKATE KITCHEN NIGHT MOVES MORE SERIES
A series reboot of Crystal Moselle’s 2018 film “Skate Kitchen,” focusing on a group of young female skateboarders in New York City, it’s very much not what the network saves for Sunday night: expensive star-fronted projects made to create prestige and win Emmys, to take over social media and suck up press coverage for weeks on end. “Betty,” premiering Friday on HBO, is such a show. But when it is good, when a breath of fresh air blows in, I thank the television gods for whatever happy accidents and industrial calculations brought it to fruition. Not everything surprising is good, of course: The phrase “I can’t believe that got made” is more often attached to bad programs than good ones. Before too long, whatever felt surprising will begin to feel familiar, and we will go back to mostly not being surprised by TV, great, good, bad or indifferent. When something different is successful enough to stick, it will spark imitators and begin to seem like part of that most horrible of all cultural phenomena - a trend. Given how much room there is for variety in television, it’s surprising how closely so much of it resembles so much else of it.
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