At the local swimming pool, fifteen year old Marie (Pauline Acquart) grows infatuated with beautiful Floriane (Adele Haenel), captain of the synchronised swimming team. This stirs some jealousy in Marie’s best friend, Anne (Louise Blachè) who, being somewhat rotund, is coping with an unrequited crush on François (Warren Jacquin), Floriane’s boyfriend. Marie joins the swim team to get closer to Floriane. After an initially frosty relationship, a close bond develops between the two girls. Marie learns that, contrary to school gossip, Floriane is far from a slut. In fact, with François eager to get her in bed, she does not want him to discover she is a virgin. So Floriane heads out to a nightclub, half-serious about losing her virginity and dragging along a hopelessly lovelorn Marie.
Making her directorial debut, French filmmaker Céline Sciamma earned considerable acclaim at the 2007 Cannes film festival with this frank but sensitive look at adolescent sexuality, although Naissance des pieuvres (literally: “birth of the octopuses”) or Water Lilies (an English title implying a more sentimentalised attitude towards young girls than is apparent here) was not without its detractors. Some felt its insights were largely shallow while for others the contrived situations drew more from teen soap opera than real life. Then there were those for whom any attempt to address this tricky subject matter was simply exploitative, which is not the case here at all. What nudity the film does feature is more matter-of-fact and not eroticized, while a key sexual encounter between two protagonists is frank but not the least bit gratuitous or even romantic. This is not a soft-focus David Hamilton art-porn opus nor a scandal-mongering Larry Clark film.
Sciamma’s low-key, naturalistic though resoundingly cinematic approach is more psychological than strictly sensual, exploring the heroines’ attitudes towards their own developing bodies and sex. Even the heated encounter at the nightclub proves more a penetrating insight into Marie’s troubled state-of-mind as she wonders whether she is being used or whether she really does have a shot with Floriane. Sciamma’s depiction of teen behaviour rings uncomfortably true, wavering from subdued malice and paranoia to euphoria and fascination with sex and death.
The twin plot strands prove equally compelling with Anne’s ungainly pursuit of feckless François toe-curlingly well observed. Meanwhile Marie’s growing romantic obsession with Floriane unfolds in a manner alternately melancholy, poetic and tender. Although beautiful and desirable, Floriane emerges as tragic a figure as lovelorn Marie, slipping into the role of school slut in part because that is what her peers already believe her to be. If high school is indeed a microcosm of society then what does that say about attitudes in the wider world?
Some labelled the film cynical in reflecting the young characters attitudes towards sex as something used as either a weapon or form of control, but the fact remains in such an environment this is often the one power a teenage girl has at her disposal. Sciamma makes no judgement upon her heroines’ actions, but simply presents adolescent sexuality as a multifaceted force as reflected in the original French title. Cinematographer Crystel Fournier deals some arresting images without suffocating the essentially intimate tone while the performances by the young cast are uniformly outstanding. Features a fine meditative score by Jean-Baptiste de Laubier.
