Water Lilies

Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian: An elegant, erotic film about love among teenage swimmers.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2008/mar/14/worldcinema.drama

With terrific poise and the crispest, cleanest cinematography imaginable, the 27-year-old French director Céline Sciamma has given us a very provocative and stylish drama set in the world of teenage girls' synchronised swimming.

Like the pool itself, it is a humid, self-enclosed universe, a place that Sciamma endows with frantic crushes, angst, yearning and frantically sexualised status-envy.

In a dreamy daze of longing, Sciamma's movie roams into the girls' changing room, a transgression that effectively brings the teenage characters' rapture and fear into collision with an audience's adult discomfort at being compelled to witness what they are witnessing: that is, the bodies of teenage girls and indeed boys.

This is the ultimate sexual and political incorrectness, and perhaps only a woman director could get away with it, though the eroticism is tempered by fear, by self-questioning, and also by the director's un-sexual compassion for the pain brought on by unrequited love, and perhaps even more by requited love.