So many problems and so little time. The only thing that seems constant is a continuous change, a change of character, a change of attitude, a change of perception. Our 17-year-old protagonist Mickael starts Douches froides (Cold Showers) with a voice over in which he states he is not the same person as he was three months ago. Three months ago he was happy with his stunning girlfriend Vanessa (Salomé Stévenin), the judo team’s captain and preparing for his baccalaureate exams. Douches froides tracks these three months of change, a small beginning on the slow road from adolescence to adulthood. On the menu: sex in a threesome, jealousy, rivalry and discipline in sports, another episode in his parents’ rocky marriage and how to live without electricity.

In fact, Mickael (newcomer Johan Libéreau in a perfectly unaffected performance) is an adolescent like many others. He comes from a family which has difficulties in making ends meet and his mother drastically switches off the electricity when they risk going over the fixed numbers of their subscription. Cold showers and cold chocolate milk notwithstanding, at school Mickael is well-respected as the captain of the judo team. When he is asked to train together with the son of the team’s new sponsor, Mickael reluctantly agrees. But the spoilt rich kid called Clément (Pierre Perrier) turns out to be a perfectly nice guy and they get along very well despite their differences. Something that does unite them is their willingness to explore sex with Vanessa, ending up on one night sharing the same tatami for a session of lovemaking in stereo.

Exploring unknown boundaries however, does not always lead to success. Mickael is soon chased by the demons of jealousy, his parents’ marriage hits a new low because of his father’s drinking, his own violent anger gets the best of him in an argument with a team-mate. To make matters worse,  his exams are looming dangerously close on the horizon. Changes are bound to rain down on him like an unpleasant cold shower and Mickael will need to deal with them, one by one, as the only dignified way out of problems is personal growth.

It is suiting that director Antony Cordier chose the subject of growth of character for his first feature film, since Cordier himself must have changed and grown in the three or more months in which he worked on Douches froides. The very first image of the film, a close-up of a blackboard, already indicates Cordier’s central theme of learning. In the script, which the director co-wrote with July Peyr, Mickael is sketched as a character going through his adolescence with relative ease, but that does not mean that he does not learn or grow. Despite the specifics of the story, it is this attention to his normal aspects that lends Mickael his universality and therewith the audience's investment in the character.      

It is clear that Cordier is infatuated if not outright in love with his central character, at least on a sensual level, something which extends to the cinematography and the mise-en-scene which seem to caress rather than plainly register the protagonists. This fling partly blinds Cordier and his co-writer to several scenes (especially the ones involving the specifics of judo and an unresolved sub-plot involving raunchy photos) that slow down the narrative too much to justify each and every of the film’s 102 minutes. Perhaps in his second feature, Cordier will have grown and learnt just like Mickael and his well-realised characters will benefit from a tighter editing and script.

This film was screened as part of the Brussels Film Festival 2005.

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