Surfing's own Jan Brady just got herself a featurette-length movie! And ooh-wee-ooh it's good.
Now that big bro has had his thing pushed backwards between his legs, metaphorically speaking, middle bro has grabbed the pole and spotlight, also a metaphor.
Nathan Florence, twenty-five or thereabouts and with reddish brown eyes like dried blood, is the most interesting of the Florence pack. How many pro surfers can you think of who were gobbling novels when they were six and who’ll reference french author Guy Sajer’s seminal wartime novel The Forgotten Soldier? He says he likes to read “before I go to bed or after surfing, whenever you have time to relax and lay down for a second. Especially in airports. That’s when you really fly through them. I get through, in a session, maybe a hundred pages. I never fall asleep reading. People say they get sick reading in a car but that’s my favourite time to read cause car rides are… boring.”
Nathan has an accent that is a beguiling mix of Bruce Irons and Jamie O’Brien, those easy shrieks at the end of each satisfying sentence and the italicising of words (Bruce) and the agreeable mmmhmmms and mmmmmm’s that prefix most responses (O’Brien).
In this film, his first, which is called There and Back Again, our skulls are hit repeatedly with slow-motion.
But just as we’re about to regurgitate our food, like the mother bird in a nature film, we hit regular speed.
And the action tugs at your arm so completely you’ll be jerked into complete attention.
Highly recommended.