Review of Water Lilies (2007) by Clayton S — 27 Apr 2008

Water lilies (Naissance des pieuvres) is a brilliant movie about the ups, downs and especially the chills of teenage love. It's exquisite in both image and plot. Figure swimming and swimming pools dominate the decor and really adds to meaning and movie. Three teenage girls make the scene. Our heroine (Marie, girl 1), is obviously due to various reasons, a teenage dweller in the lower regions of the teenage food chain. She falls in love with another girl (Floriane, girl 2), best imaged as an alpha female [slash] femme fatale, who feeds the local gossip order because she seems to have sex with all the guys in her orbit. Marie, finds herself in a hopeless, frustrating and self destructive relationship, the latter resulting in a torn friendship with her neighbor type best friend (Anne, girl 3). Her love for Floriane however, is violently chilled down when she finds out that her passion for Floriane is less then reciprocal. This of course ends in a reconciliation with her best friend Anne.

Although set in the background of teenage dwellings, the movie is really about passion, friendship and the reasons why these two have a hard time coexisting with each other in the real world. Actually, the movie gives you the feeling that coexistence of friendship and passion or peace and passion is not possible at all, unless this being in a figurative world - In the movie this is portrayed as a surrealistic place outside the city, where Marie and Floriane experience a true, but yet false, moment of peace with "Adam and Eve type" qualities. Interestingly enough this is also the moment in which the truth is being revealed about Floriane's sexual behavior, which turns out to be a misconception, telling us that despite all gossip, she is, in fact, still virgin. Important is also, that she remains immaculate throughout the entire story.

This dualism is being further expressed by the opposites of characters. "Friendship" is associated with Marie's best friend, Anne, a sort of ugly girl who is burdened with all the mundane practicalities like responsibility, being overweight and artificial calculation of the human motive. Whereas "Passion" is associated with Marie's first love, Floriane, who is natural, never short of charm, forces us in awe and desire, dazzles us in the art of figure swimming and offers us the thrill of escape. At the same time "friendship", as we find out later, offers stability and forgiveness whereas "passion" is destructive, all consuming, makes you bite deep into the bitter apple, but is, interestingly enough as we find out later, also innocent and immaculate - "Fire simply burns, nothing more nothing less. The ones that suffer are the moths.".

As a fun fact, the movie also expresses the differences of boy and girl quite strongly. Female society is best portrayed here as figure swimming, gracious on the surface but invisibly hardworking below the waterline, extreme kicking of legs to stay afloat and aligned. Male society, however, is portrayed as wild and driven by sex, resulting in horny animalistic behavior. Male society particularly gets a blow in the face during the last fifteen minutes, when a deliberate lengthy scene, set in a pool party, involves a group of boyish male swimmers, jumping around (dancing) like apes, wearing jog pants and their speedo's pulled back over their heads like masks, basically making them unrecognizable from each other - "Credo: You men, are all the same." This scene is followed by a dodgy locker room scene in which Anne, as a girl, reproaches one of these horny boys, showing her moral superiority, by spitting in his mouth at the beginning of an act of which the boy obviously thought it to be his lucky moment. Obviously our director here in question can only be female.

All in all, a very good movie.