Water Lillies (Naissance des pieuvres) (2007)
85 min.
Country: France
Genre: Drama, Romance
Language: French (stream with English subtitles)
Set during a sultry summer in a French suburb, Marie is desperate to join the local pool's synchronized swimming team, but is her interest solely for the sake of sport or for a chance to get close to Floriane, the bad girl of the team? Sciamma, and the two leads, capture the uncertainty of teenage sexuality with a sympathetic eye in this delicate drama of the angst of coming-of-age.
Watch on The Criterion Channel
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The movie that shaped my adolescence, and the movie which my adolescence is shaped after.
I will never forget this movie, and i will never forget how this movie makes me feel. Salty tears and salty hands, fingers, sour apples, bitter grudges, and sweet cherry lipstick. Basic petrichor earth, to chlorine poolwater, and a stunted atmosphere. It's like a cloudy, humid day, in all but a bleak, and boring, oh how boring, place; it all echoes under the heavy concrete "préaux". Though, the sun never sets; if you're lucky, maybe, it will, around 10pm.
And yet there's this overbearing, teeming, daft and severe youth, that only seeks one or two specific things, and there's aimless nostalgia everywhere, all around those brittle plastic chairs and cups; about what it was, about what i never had, what i wish i had, and about what i wish that hadn't happened. This film is so quiet, it doesn't want anything from me; making it so close to my heart... It's my little thing, i can't really explain it!
I've waited for more than a whole year to pass in order to rewatch this, hoping it would feel the same as it did the first time that i had seen it; it's been a total of 15 months, around 450 days, between april 14th 2021 and july 14th 2022. Unfortunately, in the meantime, i have grown up, matured, even within the tight span of a year; i'm not the same My Name as the one who first saw this film; i'm not the same hurt, deluded, yearning, teenage girl. It feels like a million years ago. Nevertheless, it's just a part of it all; it only makes my silly nostalgia stronger, it leaves me dreaming about what could've been different, even in now forgotten, fossilized, archaic feelings.
Repost of my 2022 review, i promised you i would rewatch this!
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