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Friday 5 September 2008

Teenage pain

Water Lilies
15, Curzon Soho and key cities

I did consider seeing this week’s big high-concept film, Disney’s Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert in 3D — but just couldn’t face it. Based on a popular American pre-teen TV series, I felt I couldn’t be certain I’d like Hannah in any dimension. So, instead, I opted for the French film, Water Lilies, which is not big or high-concept and not in 3D. As it is, in French films you’re lucky to get a boy on a bicycle. It may even be just the boy and you’ll have to wait for the sequel to get the bicycle. There are no boys on bicycles in Water Lilies, as it happens, but it is still very much a boy-and-bicycle film, if you get what I mean, which you will unless you are slow. (Don’t worry if you are slow. I am quite slow myself and lead a reasonably normal life.)

This is a first film from writer-director Céline Sciamma and it is about being a girl, being 15, and the awakening of sexual desire, always a painful, difficult, and complex business, at least at the cinema. I think mine started waking up on the Tuesday and we were done by Thursday, but that’s by the by. It’s set in a banal, new-looking Parisian suburb against the backdrop of the municipal pool and the local synchronised-swimming squad. Synchronised swimming — or ‘designer drowning’, as it is known in our house — is daft, but also strangely spooky and compelling: all that furious paddling below — all that turmoil — while straining to look serene and polished on top. Maybe synchronised swimming, here, is a metaphor for the teenage state generally. Probably, it is.

Anyway, the focus is exclusively on three girls: Marie (Pauline Acquart), our observer, who is reserved, intense, boyish; Floriane (Adele Haenel), star of the squad and a shapely dazzler; and Anne (Louise Blachère), Marie’s devoted, plain, chubby, sometimes sweat-stained best friend. Anne is the girl you have to go around with when none of the other girls will have anything to do with you and whom you drop, pronto, the moment the situation changes. ‘Go away, you are a burden,’ Marie tells Anne at one point. This is set at the age when teenage girls and their shifting friendships are at their most shockingly cruel. Thinking about it, it’s a good job being a teenage girl happens when it does, otherwise none of us would survive it.

More articles from: Deborah Ross | this section

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