Dragonslayer
Documentaries always run the risk of mocking their subjects. When the subject is a 23-year-old former skate legend, squatting in friends’ backyards in Fullerton, California, spending his days at skate parks and riding drained pools (which litter the suburban landscape following the recent US housing-market crash) the risk is higher than usual. But within minutes of the start of Tristan Patterson’s film, Dragonslayer, as we find Josh “Skreech” Sandoval in a Norwegian skate competition, where he bails out hard, bleeding and bruised, it’s impossible to not be concerned for him.
And yet, Patterson’s film also allows Skreech to speak for himself. Armed with his own camera, Skreech captures his world—skating abandoned pools, shotgunning PBRs at house parties, playing with his newborn son—all of which is deftly edited into Patterson’s own footage. This blurs the line between documentarian and subject, and limits the possibility of privileging Patterson’s point of view over Screech’s, whose own demanour also helps matters. Simultaneously self-assured and too disconnected to comprehend his life is not “the norm,” Skreech’s worldview is unlike any other. So is the film’s.
There is little sense of time’s passage, despite the doc being split into chapters, which it marks with intertitles that count down from ten. Indeed, the film seems bizarrely goal-oriented (we have to reach the last chapter eventually) for one that deals with a subject whose life is so far from the straight and narrow. But in the final chapter, as Skreech and his girlfriend pack their car and drive off down the SoCal suburban road, the screen cuts not to the credits, but another intertitle: “Zero.” Like Skreech, Dragonslayer has a few tricks up its sleeve.
Dragonslayer doesn’t so much end as it leaves off, resisting resolution and a sense of “lessons learned.” Instead, we get the feeling that chapter zero will continue on an ambiguous path, despite the fact that its very existence resists reason and rationality. A little like Skreech’s life.