Reactions to Water Lilies are likely to be split into two camps. For women, this is an unerring portrayal of a world of traded favours, schoolgirl crushes and the weight of expectations. To men, this film about young teenage girls discovering their sexuality is an uncomfortable glimpse into a hidden and forbidden world.
In a small French suburb, Marie (Pauline Acquart) deserts her chubby friend Anne (Louise Blachère) for the stunning Floriane (Adèle Haenel), star of the girls’ synchronised swimming team and focus of the school’s rumour mill. Here, the unfurling of their various ambitions, an uneasy middle ground between finding love and losing one’s virginity, is brutally revealed.
There’s nothing salacious about Water Lilies, but writer/director Céline Sciamma’s debut is unwaveringly honest; she bluntly focuses on young breasts right from the start, as if staring viewers down. Adults barely feature – certainly none of the girls’ parents – and while Sciamma’s point may be that these young people are finding themselves, we might want to know more about the central subjects beyond these caricatures of the ‘Fat One’, the ‘Slut’ and the ‘Nascent Lezzer’. Or perhaps her point is that these are the very labels which adult society would pin on these girls, but which they are either young or naïve enough not to trade in themselves. This unsentimental view is underlined by the brutalist camerawork, which enjoys nighttime scenes and pitching the girls as water-bound alien beings.
Stuck somewhere between À ma Soeur! and Show Me Love, Water Lilies misses the wit of the latter, or the hindsight of the former. It’s fascinating, however, to see Acquart mature on screen, while Haenel gets younger before our eyes as the burden of her beauty is briefly lifted.
