From Heavenly Creatures to Show Me Love, the Sapphic coming-of-age movie has gifted us some extraordinary films in recent years, while keeping old school arthouse raincoats off our streets. Céline Sciamma’s beautifully-made adolescent drama ploughs similarly fecund same-sex terrain to gorgeous, if not wholly convincing, effect.
Set against the moist world of teenage synchronised swimming, Water Lilies forms a sexual triangle around a French suburbanite Esther Williams named Floriane (Haenel). Most of the other girls don’t much care for the prepossessing, perfectly proportioned blonde (for some reason). Marie (Acquart), who gazes longingly at Floriane’s every move, is the exception. Marie’s best friend, the plaintively dumpy Anne (Blachére) harbours an equivalent crush on male swimmer Francois (Jacquin). He, in turn, is secretly seeing Floriane. To facilitate their liaisons without arousing the suspicions of her strict parents, Floriane enlists Marie as an alibi. Slowly, however, their friendship of convenience blossoms into something more.
Mme. Sciamma deftly works this scenario for poignancy, though pangs of recognition can’t completely compensate for the unreality of the Water Lilies’ universe. It is, admittedly, an ethereal space. The girls are noticeably unencumbered with such badges of modernity as the mobile phone, an omission that’s so incongruent with contemporary girl-on-girl teen flirtation it can only be intentional. But the drab grey setting in a Parisian satellite town serves to cancel out the otherworldliness, and the characters are not quite no-holds-barred nasty enough to fit the verité decor. Where are the exquisite tortures? Where are the playground rules?
There is also something unsettling about watching the three 15- and 16 year-old leads sexually maturing onscreen. We’re seeing their initiation into womanhood unfold in dreamy, female-ordained safety, not on the pages of Barely Legal. But one still can’t shake the notion that we’re intruding on their youth and, in the process, somehow stealing something from them. An impressive debut from writer-director Sciamma just the same.