Getting in the swim - Film - Arts - Evening Standard
       

Getting in the swim

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Celine Sciamma's first feature is the second film this month to talk intelligently about female adolescence.

It's not as original as Juno, but its three 15-year-old girls, struggling with crushes and burgeoning sexuality, are so good that at times you forget this is a film at all. This could have been a French version of American Pie - but it determinedly goes much deeper.

Its summery setting is a new suburb outside Paris, where pretty blonde Floriane (Adele Haenel) wows the boys as a star member of the school's synchronised swimming team.

The flat-chested and hopeless water-baby Marie (Pauline Acquart) attaches herself to her and becomes her confidante, thus annoying the podgy Anne (Louise Blanchere).

The fraught relationship between the trio forms the basis of a sharply observant and very well acted and written film.

Its French title means Birth of Octopuses and this is an extraordinarily perceptive look at the way women grow up and men grow down, whether in the water or not.

Water Lilies (Naissance Des Pieuvres)
Cert: 15

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