Review of Water Lilies (2007) by Zak H — 01 Apr 2008

Having heard and read any of the natiional press publicity for this uncomfartable, accomplished movie, the adult male viewer would be inclined towards sn element of trepidation at the prospect of knowingly entering a cinema where naked teenage female bodies are to be on show. It proves a misplaced fear. There is no voyeurism to watching this film; merely angst and heartache.

27 year old Celine Sciamma has focused her first feature on the nature of the heirarchy of beauty, using as her subject a group of girls in their mid-teens in suburban Paris who share an interest in synchronised swimming. The films heroine, Marie (Pauline Acquart), is seen spectating at an event in the opening scene presumably in support of her best friend Anne (Louise Blachere). It is when the senior team's performance takes place, however, that Marie falls in love with leur capitaine Floriane (Adele Haenel).

Floriane is the object of desire of males young and old throughout the movie. She is despised in equal measure by her contemporaries in the locker room, jealous at what they perceive to be her sexual precociousness, she uses her facial beauty and maturing body to provoke the other girls and make them jealous. When she realises Marie's attraction to her, she embarks upon a course of systemativally using the naive, besotted girl. With outrageous odacity, Floriane invites Marie to her home in order to facilitate a couple of hours away from her parents only in order to ditch Marie at a pre-arranged meeting with Philippe, the hero of the teenage boys water polo team and object of Anne's desires.

Anne is of a playful, passive disposition. She is ashamed of her frumpy, over-curved body. When Marie negelcts her to pursue Floriane, she takes solace in the company of an elderly neighbour's dog. There is something deeply melancholy and upsetting about Anne's calling in life. Finding herself in a perpetual state of jealousy when at parties, when Philippe finally offers himself to her, she knows it's only after his failure to procure sex from Floriane. Humiliated, she pits in his face.

Yet Floriane's part in the pantomine of life is upsetting in its own way too. Less deserving of sympathy, she commands hatred through envy, albeit one she does nothing to quell and although she complains of the stresses of beauty and the daily slog to avoid the circling attentions of various admirers, she always gives the impression she wouldn't change places with the other girls. When she eventually persuades Marie to have the guts to kiss her, she immediately laughs off the act, washes her mouth and changes the discussion to the potential availability of the boys on the other side of the door. Marie, for her part, is perfectly well aware of the mis-treatment she's recieveing but finds herself completely unable to stand up to what she sees as Floriane's absolute beauty.

This story could be told in any school playground, nightclub or office anywhere in the world. The skill involved in usings one's youthful atttractivness in order to make others behave in the way one desires is one practised, to at least some degree, by everyone, at one time or another.

Conciously, there are no adults in this movie, only the spectre of them. The characters in this film are of an age where adults have served their useful purpose as providers and shapers of behaviour and now exist, purely inconveniently, as a deterence to the realisation of the freedom of one's own adulthood.