Synchronised swimming frames Céline Sciamma’s tale of cruel adolescence. By BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM.

IT’S a cliché to state that adolescence isn’t necessarily easy, but if you take the Hollywood approach, it’s full of perfectly formed teenagers who eventually find everlasting love. Water Lilies takes the opposite approach: tumid emotions, barely-suppressed hormones, and unrequited infatuations appear the norm. The film looks at a love quadrangle, but one which is full of sharply defined characters who scramble for higher ground with self-interest and selfishness. Barely a trace of love is there.

The film is set in the world of synchronised swimming, the sport acting as a metaphor for adolescence, the pasted-on facial exteriors masking the churning and struggling underneath the surface. Sciamma films the weird sexist rituals of the sport with a detached eye too, the routines establishing a rather cruel gendered environment. The synchronised swim-team’s captain, Floriane, is glamorous, seemingly precocious, and the object of the other girls’ fascination and jealousy. She is admired by Marie, basically a plain-Jane-opposite of the magnetic Floriane. Floriane is flirting heavily with François, and she’s using Marie to assist in secret trysts with him. To round off the sexual lines is Marie’s best friend Anne, the pudgy, awkward admirer of François.

Sciamma elicits great performances from her young cast. Their gaits, the way they hold themselves in conversation, their nonchalance (or lack of) betray as much about the characterisation as the naked dialogue (there’s a particularly vicious, but memorable scene set in McDonalds). The film charts a similar territory to Catherine Breillat’s masterpiece A Ma Soeur!, albeit with a gentler tone, and the film’s synth heavy electronica is very reminiscent of Air’s soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s teenage sexuality advertisement The Virgin Suicides. The distinctions between the have and have-nots, the ugly and the pretty, the ones who will be successes and the ones who will be wallpaper are depicted with a beady, atmospheric eye. More vividly, the film captures the fantasies, the vulnerabilities, and the pitiless realities of growing up.