Maidentrip

As the principal cameraman in Maidentrip, Laura Dekker, a fifteen-year-old girl from Holland, has all the means to make an introspective autobiography about her solo journey around the world, and she toys with this sometimes – she tells us about feeling displaced, and the complications of her fragmented family. She weeps when dolphins swim alongside her sailboat, beautiful companions after so much loneliness. But despite the intimacy of this voyage, its extent, its expanse, we never learn much about Laura. Adolescence tends to hold others at arm’s length. Maidentrip tends to, as well.

Laura Dekker is no documentarian. She is a sailor and a teenager. Her footage is light on the processes and the challenges that would bulk up and inform a documentary of this caliber. This is no doubt due in part to the fact that those were the very moments she was busiest, but because of this logistical decision and because of what adolescence is, Maidentrip lacks a handle on duration, patience, composition, experimentation, and self-reflection – except, notably, when the camera is handed to an adult.

Laura doesn’t have to be a documentarian. Her accomplishment is unheard of. Her confidence is astounding. She is prepared and capable and resilient. At sea for 519 days, traveling over 27,000 nautical miles, she successfully realized her dream of sailing around the world by herself. She is as bona fide an adventuress as anyone, and she feels invincible.

But it is remarkable that the form of this film downplays the adventure of it. Vulnerability, danger, weakness, and doubt, the necessary opponents of success, are quite nearly foregone in this 80 minute long documentary.

As recorded by Laura, Maidentrip is a travelogue. Laura listens to pop music, dyes her hair red, and dances around her beloved ship Guppy. Her eyes often waver between the camera lens and the viewfinder, always conscious of her appearance but not self-conscious enough to not stick her tongue out. She dabbles in angst and the f-word. In one scene she is visiting the Pacific Islands and dealing with the customs office there, finding it preposterous that someone would think to bother her about her itinerary. The moment simultaneously represents the insolence of adventure and the inconvenience of systems. Both people are right to be annoyed. Laura’s platitudes about dreams coming true seem like flaccid excuses to dismiss the mundane and the routine. She expresses disdain for the Dutch way of life, indignant about the prescribed pattern of getting things: a car, a job, a house, a baby. This is why she left that world, she says. Everything at home is boring and stupid.

But of course she feels that way, and of course her emphasis is on her invincibility without ever giving us the details about it. What is more egotistical than adolescence? What is more contradictory? What shifts and morphs as frequently as the oceans? But here is an important irony; sailing is a supremely monotonous task punctuated by duress and excitement. Laura Dekker must appreciate "nothingness" more than she realizes. Her journey makes it clear that she understands what the means to an end are, and that she understands that an end isn’t the point at all. And when examined, this point opens up more than she intended.

Maidentrip zips by too quickly without ever really letting us in. This is a brief and snappy documentary about a long and arduous expedition. It seems that everything that goes unsaid or unshown in Maidentrip is where the truth and the significance of Laura’s adventure really is: the process, the boredom, the loneliness, the emotions, the opinions, the danger, the growth. Leaving is a classical notion, indeed, archetypal. As such, Laura’s is a hero’s journey, and if life is a journey then adolescence is a particularly tricky leg to navigate. Her age prevents her from complete objectivity but it also makes her wary of addressing her own subjectivity. There is one shot in the very beginning of the film where we see Laura from far above, minuscule in her tiny boat, in the expanse of blue. The shot, taken by an adult at a distance, represents more truth about her situation, both as a sailor and as a teenager, than she is able to capture in her handheld camcorder, held at arm's length and pointed at herself.