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| Photo credit: First Match/IMDb |
That line, from The Replacements’ “Bastards of
Young,” has evoked strong emotions in listeners for decades, but it’s not
entirely right, is it? For many people, especially when we’re young, “the ones
we’ll die to please” do love us, but they still might not have our best
interest at heart. They love us, but perhaps not more than they love
themselves. They love us, but they ask us to make sacrifices for them when they
wouldn’t do the same for us—and in return we get little breadcrumbs of love
dropped for us on a trail that we mistakenly think will lead to their full
heart. That’s the dynamic that teenage Monique has with her dad in
writer-director Olivia Newman’s new Netflix drama, First Match.
Love and Manipulation
Aren’t Mutually Exclusive
Monique, played by newcomer Elvire Emanuelle, is
a foster child who doesn’t spend enough time with any foster families to even bother
learning their names—she puts her latest caretaker in her phone under “Spanish
Lady,” for instance. “I have a family,” she insists, referring to her
father, the recently incarcerated Darrel (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who returns
to her life in a limited—and manipulative—way. He’s distant at first, perhaps
out of shame that his first post-jail job is cleaning up rat droppings and
taking out the trash at a local shop, perhaps out of selfishness and wanting to
be rid of his past. Either way, Monique, nicknamed Mo by her teammates on her
high school’s otherwise all-male wrestling team, feels the sting of tears
welling up in her eyes thanks to her dad’s reluctance to spend time with her.
As Mo runs down the street, tearful and hyperventilating with grief and anger,
cinematographer Ashley Connor’s handheld camera “struggles” (re: this is
entirely on purpose) to find its focus on her face in profile, which blurs her.
The streetlights are magnified into floating orbs of color, menacing Mo,
threatening to overtake her, as Newman and Connor say, “She is unraveling and
in need of structure.”
But once Darrel, a former champion wrestler in
his own right, learns that the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, his
ears perk up. Mo knows which way the wind blows, so she challenges him, dares
him to attend her wrestling matches at school, as she and her teammates
make their bid for New York City’s finals. She knows that competition is the
only thing that animates her father, and she wants to use it for something positive
after a lifetime of neglect. Emanuelle plays this scene like the mastermind of
a heist. She knows the score, or at least she thinks she does. She’s gonna get
the love that’s owed to her, red flags be damned.
And so dad starts coming around. He starts
joking with her, making fun of her music taste (“This is old as me,” he says
while scrolling through her music history) and ribbing her about the boy she
has a crush on. He recalls minute details of her when she was young, before he
got so strapped for cash that he had to start slinging drugs, which led to his
imprisonment. He buys her brand new wrestling shoes. He’s back. Hunky dory? No,
of course not, because their environment is still garbage and their
father-daughter “wrestling practices” must occur between drug deals—Darrel
can’t handle being paid minimum wage for wretched work, so he returns to the
corner. It makes Mo feel bad, but Darrel’s dropping all those love breadcrumbs
every step of the way.
Newman, expanding on the short-film version of First
Match from 2010, has no interest in making Darrel a villain. Those love
breadcrumbs are the best he can do, all he can offer to the daughter he had
when he was still turning heads in the wrestling ring as a youngster.
Abdul-Mateen shares his director’s view of the character, too. He plays Darrel
as a desperate yet hopeful man who wants to be rid of his baggage so he can
move out of state to open a business. His desperation creates ulterior motives
for his wrestling practice with Mo, and soon he’s talking her into taking
beatings in underground boxing matches to earn quick cash for his (and maybe
her) ticket out of town and away from drugs, prison, and memories of failure.
Conner’s cinematography doesn’t give the
audience any chance to remove themselves from the icky balance that Darrel and
Mo strike. When you watch First Match, you are right there with those
characters. Unlike most indie flicks produced in the last decade, this film
eschews cold, distancing blues in favor of earth tones and the hazy yellow of
big city street lights—if you squint, the film looks at times like an
especially serious, nighttime-set episode of Broad City, which is much
appreciated. Like Mo’s living situation and emotional state, the film has an
organic look, unsanitized to show the shifting ground beneath Mo. Her quest for
structure feels earned with every peek at the crumbling infrastructure and
struggling lives around her.
But is that structure to come from her father,
the man one would typically hope she winds up living with? Or is the structure
already there between the circles of the wrestling mat, with her caring coach
and helpful (and cute) teammates there, cheering her on? It would seem a simple
choice, but real life isn’t that simple. Those love breadcrumbs sure are
tempting, and doing what’s right for you isn’t always easy, especially when
it’s your own flesh and blood telling you to sacrifice your best interest.
Director: Olivia Newman
Writer: Olivia Newman
Starring: Elvire Emanuelle, Yahya Abdul-Mateen
II, Colman Domingo, Jharrel Jerome, Kim Ramirez, Jared Kemp
Available now on Netflix
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