Water Lilies
Starring: Pauline Acquart, Louise Blachere, Adele Haenel
Director: Celine Sciamma
The film: Celine Sciamma's film revolves around three teenage girls careering towards a slow and sometimes painful discovery on the physical and spiritual aspects of love. Offering scant titillation and rough-hewn melodrama but a wealth of subtle, reflective scenes, Water Lilies is one of the most insightful and humane treatments of adolescent desires to have emerged on screen in recent years. It's also one of the most sure-handed directorial debuts ever, all the more remarkable given Sciamma was 25 when she made it.
The film's title alludes to the art of synchronised swimming, the sport which brings together the three protagonists and the boy, which forms the story's love quadruple. The flashy part of the equation lies in Floriane (Adele Haenel), the blonde captain of the team who flaunts her beauty and enthralls boys and men; then there's Marie (Pauline Acquart), whose initial admirations of Floriane from afar turn into a confused mix of love and loathing as she discovers how she's just Floriane's fallback girl when her flirtations with boys go awry. Making up the triangle is the gangly Anne (Louise Blachere), whose immaturity and unease with her body hinders her pursuit of Francois (Warren Jacquin), the sexually frustrated swimmer who Floriane flirts with.
In less confident hands, Water Lilies could have been infused with high drama and explicit making-out scenes. But Sciamma delivers a film driven by static shots, many with unnerving silence. It's a clever move: by driving the characters' bubbling emotions inwards, the tension is immense and a perfect portrayal of how teenage desires are rarely articulated or dealt with. And when physical intimacy and acerbic verbal warfare are shown, they're done well: the sex is either mechanical and stressful (the scene in which Marie helps Floriane lose her virginity is heartbreaking), and the dialogue revealing of how girls deal with their budding sexuality.