If anyone’s come up with an image more cinematic than a matchstick-sized man riding a tsunami of a wave, I’ve yet to see it. And Ride the Wave’s matchstick man ratchets up the tension by being a 14-year-old boy: Ben Larg, a Scottish junior surfing champion based on the Hebridean island of Tiree. Normally, big-wave surfing documentaries focus on lantern-jawed, seasoned watermen, but Martyn Robertson’s film has an interestingly vulnerable edge by focusing on the stripling Larg’s desire to tackle Aileen’s and Mullaghmore, two of the cold-water breaks on Ireland’s west coast – and how his parents manage their stress levels accordingly.
One minute Larg is a blond-bobbed grommet, with more than a passing resemblance to the late Dogtowner Jay Adams, crying after flunking his heats at international competitions. Half an hour into the film, he’s suddenly a bum-fluffed teenager who’s sizing up the Gaelic big-wave spots, notably the menacing Aileen’s which is capable of holding 50ft waves that wash you towards a scree field underneath 700ft shale cliffs. It’s the latest instalment of an old story: how troubled surfers throw themselves into the waves to wash off emotional turmoil on land. On Tiree, his parents are immigrants from inland, and Larg is heavily bullied to the point where they pull him and his siblings out of school.
