Lírios d'água

Scrawny Marie (Pauline Acquart) and awkward chubby friend Anne (Louise Blachère) are standard outsiders. It's summer and they hang out at the pool watching the synchronized swimmers. Marie befriends beautiful Floriane (Adèle Haenel) who leads the swim team. Floriane is the subject of much gossip. Marie starts hanging out with Floriane putting pressure on her friendship with Anne. Meanwhile Anne is obsessed with hunky François.

It's a story of sexual searching and an awkward coming-of-age. There are a few daring scenes. I love when Marie and Anne have a fight. However the plot feels a bit too slight. It's too quiet and the danger is all internal. I want more conflicts. In the end, some stuff happens but they all end up in the same place.

The significance of French title of this film, "La Naissance des Pieuvres" which literally means "The Birth of the Octopuses", is rather obscure, so it is perhaps not surprising that it has been marketed in English-speaking countries as "Water Lilies". The "lilies" of the English title are three teenage girls, Marie, Anne and Floriane, who are members of a synchronised swimming team based in the Paris suburbs, and the film is a "coming-of-age" drama about the development of their first sexual feelings.

One feature of the film, perhaps unusual for a film of this type, is that it concentrates exclusively on relationships between the young people themselves. We see nothing of their parents or their teachers, and very little of the adult world at all. The three girls are very different in appearance, and are portrayed as being very different in character. The shy, retiring Marie is slim and petite and appears to be the youngest of the three. Anne is something of a plain Jane, Floriane a glamorous blonde who is very popular with the boys. The three, together with a handsome male swimmer named Francois, are involved in what might be described as a love-quadrilateral.

Anne has fallen in love with Francois, but he is smitten with Floriane, who seems to return his affections, although he is by no means her only male admirer. Indeed, not all of Floriane's admirers are male, because Marie has a crush on her attractive friend. The film charts the way in which their friendship develops; at first it seems that Floriane is simply using Marie as a convenient excuse when she is in fact going out to meet boys; her parents presumably object to her dating boys, but have no objection to her going out with female friends. Later, however, we realise that, despite Floriane's image as the sexy, popular girl who is always the centre of male attention, she actually reciprocates Marie's feelings. The film reverses some conventional stereotypes about sexuality. Anne, with her short hair and rather chunky figure, looks typically "butch", yet she is the only one of the three main characters who is unambiguously heterosexual, whereas the more conventionally feminine Marie and the glamorous Floriane are lesbian, or at least bisexual.

Coming-of-age films are common enough, although most of them tend to avoid the controversial topic of teenage lesbianism. "Water Lilies", however, deals with its subject-matter in a sensitive way, with three very good performances from its three leading actresses, Pauline Acquart, Adele Haenel and Louise Blachere. The relationships between the characters, especially that between Marie and Floriane, are complex, and capable of a number of interpretations. (Is Floriane, for example, simply using Marie for sex, or does she genuinely have romantic feelings for her? Could Floriane's sluttish behaviour with Francois and the other boys be just a device to hide her lesbian feelings from the outside world? Or even to hide them from herself?) This was the first film made by its young director Celine Sciamma (only 27 at the time); on this basis she must be regarded as a highly promising newcomer. 7/10

I saw it at Cinema MK2 Hautefeuille just one night after its first public projection in Paris. A very pretty film about three 15 years old teenagers, all of them just at about the same psychologically stages. Many of the scenes let us to come back to our adolescence age & our first feelings about sexual relations. it is possible to imagine that the director would like to reduce the first strong sensual feelings of the girls to lesbianism, but even in that case she doesn't corrupt the likelihood of the story. You can sometimes find the film a little slow but it is what creates this intimate atmosphere. I fund the young actresses of talent, special mention with Floriane and Marie, very convincing. There are many small details but this film also enabled me to discover what synchronized swimming is: impressing!

A bit slow (somehow like a Sofia Coppola movie) but still a very captivating film about the discovery of sexuality by three teenage girls. The magic of the movie lies in its capacity to bring back many memories to how it felt like to be their age. The confusion and the insecurities are portrayed in a very simple way but so true to life. The music is perfect and the acting is amazing. The camera works beautifully also. I highly recommend it for those who are not afraid to look back at this particular period of life when we discover our sexual impulses and our desires. I would also say that it is a fine film for young people going through that period. So many movies have been made about adolescence but this really captures the true essence of discovering the adult world of romance and its complexities.

Also known as "Water Lilies" this film tells the story of two girls as they struggle their way into the world of love and sex. This story is told at a slow pace and that works very well. It gives plenty of time and space to get to know the different characters and to grow somewhat attached to them.

Using a small cast puts some extra pressure on the people playing as they all have some more screen time than normal but the people playing in this film handle that well. Everyone is completely believable. Visual setting is great, especially the underwater shots in the swimming pool add a nice effect.

Many films have been made about the same subject though and this one does not really stand out above any of them. It pulls some "standard" pressure methods out of the high hat and works on them. It isn't bad, not at all, but it surely isn't great either and I do feel it could have done better if it had taken some what less explored angles.

7 out of 10 synchronous swimmers