Young teenage girls explore the nebulous territory of their own and each other’s sexuality in Céline Sciamma’s highly accomplished feature debut Naissance des pieuvres (Water Lilies). Set in the world of competitive synchronised swimming for secondary schools girls, the Cannes Un certain regard entry benefits from an extremely nuanced script, flawless performances from its young leads and great cinematography. With these elements tightly drawn together under her supervision, Sciamma announces herself as a major new talent to watch. Lesbian overtones should help it get niche distribution with gay-friendly distributors, who can then expand their audiences to include discerning cinemagoers of all ages and orientations.

 

Marie (Pauline Acquart) is a petite 15-year-old girl from the Parisian suburbs who looks underdeveloped when compared to her classmates and the girls on the synchronised swimming team she is so eager to join. Her self-consciously zaftig best friend Anne (Louise Blachère) is perhaps Marie’s physical opposite and gutsy and direct in ways Marie can only dream of, though they both struggle with the same problems. Anne is already on the team but is far from one of its more popular members. When one of the girls on the swim team organises a party and Anne proposes Marie to go there, she asks "but are you invited?" to which the sly Anne replies: "I know where it is".

 

Anne and Marie's relationship changes dramatically when Marie starts hanging out with Floriane (Adele Haenel), the stunning blonde with the model-like body who is the swim team’s captain. Though shunned by the other girls of the team, she is the wet dream of every boy in their class. Floriane decides to use Marie as an excuse to sneak out for lovemaking sessions with her current boyfriend, forging, if not a friendship, at least a sense of uneasy complicity.

 

Sciamma’s set-up is the classical stuff of any adolescence story: the key ingredient is the overdose of uncertainty that rules the characters’ thinking and behaviour. But instead of sticking to well-trodden paths of adolescent behaviour as filtered through the tradition of John Hughes, Sciamma goes into territory that is both unexpected and logical, looking at the girls’ sexuality and their interaction with a razor-like sharpness that suggests less the shallow waters of boxoffice safety than a teenage Catherine Breillat.

 

Unafraid to be ugly, confrontational or even shocking, the film reaches a level of emotional honesty rarely seen on screen, and while the film confounds expectations about its trio of leading ladies at every turn, their behaviour is never less than believable. A lot of below-the-belt work is required for these synchronised swimming fanatics to keep their heads above water and Sciamma's perceptive and uncompromising script is flawlessly acted by the young actresses, most of them with very little previous acting experience. Acquart, who plays the pivotal role of Marie, is especially impressive, combining carefully dosed portions of anxiety, calculated passiveness and erratic teenage behaviour into a believable and full-bodied performance.

 

The sport as portrayed by Schiama’s talented cinematographer Crystel Fournier (another great female behind the camera after Nuovomondo’s Agnès Godard) is also extremely cinematic, lending the tale of youthful self-discovery an arresting visual look in which swimming-pool blues and crystal-clear lighting dominates.

 

The original French titles translates as "Birth of Octopuses", which refers to the nascent synchronised swimmers when only their moving legs can be seen under water.