Obscure objects of desire compete in Céline Sciamma’s teen milieu. By DAVID LEVINSON.

NOT COUNTING the crystalline emptiness of the teens who populate MTV’s möbius strip of “reality” shows, for most of us adolescence poses a frustrating paradox: Often, at the time, you feel too heady with angst to take charge of the freedom of being young, but from thereon must be subjected to vision after vision that mines that pain for poetic frisson. Water Lilies, by firsttime French director Céline Sciamma, is the latest offender that romanticises – and, by proxy whitewashes – the struggles of puberty, giving itself over to a kind of softcore pageantry.

Cut-and-pasting from Breillat, the film introduces the lopsided friendship between delicate, sullen Marie (Pauline Acquart) and her dumpy friend Anne (Louise Blachère); together, they hold a negligible place in the high-school feeding frenzy, though Marie is suddenly awoken to her potential for something greater when she witnesses a synchronised-swimming ritual, led by willowy beauty Floriane (Adele Haenel). Running into Floriane at a party that night, Marie’s interest suddenly blossoms into a fraught obsession, as she begs Floriane to allow her to attend team practices. Floriane agrees, in exchange employing the quiet 15-year old as a guard during her trysts with an anonymous jock, which take place in an underground parking lot nestled somewhere in the suburbs. Eventually, out of mounting frustration and jealousy, Marie lashes out, forcing Floriane to confess that she’s actually a virgin.

In essence, Sciamma conducts each of her character’s fates along the lines of these simple reversals: Icy princess Floriane is revealed to be a sensitive ingénue, burdened by her awareness of having to live up to her aura of promiscuity; Anne, who disappears for half the film, suddenly reemerges in the arms of Floriane’s jock-crush François, whom she rejects in an incongruous surge of power; while shy Marie – the most well-drawn of the three – proves to be a battleground of sexual unrest, spurred on by Floriane’s own hesitancy over whether to betray social creed and sleep with her. In placing such strong focus on the world of swimming – where inner turmoil must give way to lithe spectacle –, Sciamma forces a comment on the role-playing nature of teen politics. Yet, lacking the psychological know-how to correctly flesh out her trio of femmes, the overall feeling here is an emboldening of the bigotry Sciamma’s supposedly fighting against.

Take the fate of Anne, who on the surface resembles the spurned girls that inhabit Breillat’s skewed coming-of-age tales: Whereas Breillat will juxtapose her characters’ penetrating self-uncertainty with coarse flights of womanhood – thus, never granting us an easy handle on their stormy egos – Anne feels entirely complacent in her role as an object of derision; consequently, her sexuality exists only as a shameful source of wonder, finally satisfied by François on the same night he intends to capture Floriane’s virginity, but elliptically shows up at her house instead – marking the culminating point in her frequent vies for his heart.

Awestruck, on his part, at having found a companion who will put out, François latches onto Anne again at a later party, where she mounts him and – face hovering seductively over his – spits into his mouth. But as an eleventh-hour triumpth, the moment feels tacked on, and hardly compensation for the fact that Anne is the only one to appear naked in the film; less than confrontational, the bias represents a cop-out on Sciamma’s part – a willingness to, at all costs, preserve Floriane and Marie as gloomy objects of titillation.