Girl Power

‘Stick It’ and ‘Water’ center around good-girl characters whose refusal to play by the rules opens the eyes of adults.

By: Elise Nakhnikian
   Full of quick cuts, extreme athleticism and sardonic dialogue, with Missy Elliott rocking the soundtrack, Stick It is a girl-power movie set in the world of competitive gymnastics.
   Haley Graham (Missy Peregrym) is a sullen rebel, fed up with her self-centered, neglectful parents. She doesn’t have much use for anyone else either, aside from her goofily loyal best friends Frank (Kellan Lutz) and Pooty (John Patrick Amedori), who share her love of high-risk mountain-biking stunts that tend to end in breaking something. Then one of those stunts gets Haley to juvenile court and the judge sentences her to VGA, a boot camp-like gymnastics academy.
   A "natural" who walked out of the sport without explanation during a key gymnastics championship, Haley has a reputation to live down at VGA, where she’s seen as an arrogant head case. But she could care less what the other students, who she calls "robots," think of her. "Sick and tired of being judged," she’s also sick of a sport where what counts is not how well you do but how well you follow the rules — doing what the coaches and judges want.
   She has to stay this time, but she does it on her own terms, developing a fierce way of moving that trades in perkiness for raw power. Along the way, she inadvertently sparks a revolt, inspiring the competitors to unite in protest against the supercilious, unfair judges.
   Writer-director Jessica Bendinger, a former model whose writing credits include Bring It On, a likable goof on the cutthroat world of cheerleading, knows a thing or two about camaraderie and competition between young women. Hyperactive editing and too many close–ups during the routines can get in the way of appreciating their performances, but Bendinger is good with the buildup to the event, showing how hard these young athletes train and the pressure they get from vampirically vicarious mothers, absent dads and paternalistic coaches. She’s also got an eye for the backstabbing, incestuous backstage world of gymnastics, and an ear for the snappy, sardonic way teenagers talk ("It’s not called gym-nice-tics," the academy’s backbiting queen bee tells Haley).
   But the most refreshing thing about her movie is how it razzes the leering aura of sexuality that so often permeates gymnastics coverage and makes us see the girls as the athletes they are.
   Water: The girls and women in Water face some of the same challenges as the ones at VGA, but what a difference a new world makes in how those issues play out and how crippling they are.
   Set on the Ganges in 1938, Water is the third in a trilogy by writer/director Deepa Mehta, a Toronto-based filmmaker who specializes in art-house historical romances. Fire (1996) was the story of an extended family in which two neglected wives find love with each other. Earth (1998) showed the partition of India through the eyes of a child, with much of the drama played out in terms of the Hindu and Muslim men who courted her beautiful nanny.
   Water also puts a gorgeous woman looking for love at the center of its story. Lisa Ray, a former model whose quiet grace carries its own authority, is fine as Kalyani, but the slightly sappy too-goodness of her suitor, Narayana, an idealistic young follower of Gandhi, makes that part of the plot feel formulaic — particularly since Narayana is played by a somewhat wooden John Abraham. But even his rigid righteousness is welcome after a while, since the women in this story are so desperately in need of a champion.
   Water is about a centuries-old Hindu practice of banishing widows to live out the rest of their lives "half-dead," with other impoverished widows. (The ostracization of widows was since banned, but millions of widows are still mistreated, according to a crawl at the end of the film.)
   Respectable women treat the widows as if their condition were contagious. Forbidden to remarry and reduced to begging for their livelihood, the widows are unable to move freely about the town. They can’t even eat certain foods — a deprivation that’s brought painfully to life when one elderly widow finally gets one of the sweets she has dreamed of for years and pops it greedily into her toothless mouth.
   The widows’ ashram in Water is put into "an uproar," as one resident puts it, when a 7-year-old child bride-turned-widow arrives. Like Haley in Stick It, Chuyia (Sarala, a charmingly guileless 8-year-old village girl from Sri Lanka) was a "good girl," trusting and submissive — until her family abandoned her. Then both girls became rebels, and their stubborn truthfulness and refusal to play by the rules forced other people to see themselves and their situation more clearly.
   Production on Water was delayed by several years because Mehta had to stop filming in 2000 when Hindu fundamentalists protested the movie as anti-Hindu, ransacking the set (she later resumed filming in Sri Lanka). It’s easy to see why, since the film makes a strong case against oppressing women in the name of God.
   The callous ritual shown in Water has wasted and warped human potential for centuries. And that makes this lovely, leisurely told story more chilling than most horror movies.
Not rated. Stick It: Rated PG-13 for some crude remarks.