Water Lilies

[DMt.]

For this 4,000th view of the thread, here's a recommendation; watch your favourite NdP scenes, or even the whole thing, at 0.67 speed [or even 0.5 for silent sequences].

I've got good-quality VLC slomo captures of the scene where Marie moves in on Floriane's shower, and the deleted scene where she wakes up in Floriane's lap after nearly drowning, but sadly the sound in both is broken up. Hoping to recompile them when [if?] I can find a freeware video editing utility.

Beautiful and strange!

[katka]

I understand well that you want to convert the video with the deleted scene edited ? For a video converter is good (in my opinion) a Tube Catcher. It's freeware. You put into this program your video and than you choose some format which you want. Starting converting and that's it.

[DMt.]

Thanks Kat, I'll check it out.

[DMt.]

In the bike ride scene apres la piscine, when Anne has taken over and carries Marie, does Marie plant a little kiss on the top of her head as they ride down the hill?

[snaps]

In the bike ride scene apres la piscine, when Anne has taken over and carries Marie, does Marie plant a little kiss on the top of her head as they ride down the hill?

I am sure that even if they didn't, it would have been appropriate. Anne and Marie have a symbiotic relationship throughout. Driven to desperation by their differences, they both know that they are stronger together than without each other. Without each other they are doomed to drown in life's pool of survivaL of the fittest. Floriane/ Francois are infatuations of how life should be rather than how it actually is. Anne and Marie is the real love story of Ndp. 'I don't really like you that much ... but I probably love you.'

[fish]

... Anne and Marie is the real love story of Ndp. 'I don't really like you that much ... but I probably love you.'

Very much the case in my view too.

Didn't notice the kiss. I'll have to watch it again.
You know, just for the sake of resolving this question of course.

[DMt.]

Anne and Marie is the real love story of NdP. 'I don't really like you that much ... but I probably love you.'

A very strong argument indeed; and one I also approached by saying that they discover at the end that 'friendship is also love, and quite possibly the better part of it'.

Alas, the only good-looking freeware video editor I can find out there, AviDemux, just crashes horribly when I try to install it; and though the VLC slo-mo captures I've done look great, and timestretch the audio within VLC without changing pitch [a great blessing when trying to figure out the actual dialogue!], the audio track's getting lost when I save the segment out.

[DMt.]

First movie, first love, first kiss, first Cannes, first roles. Despite all the young men who literally splash the screen, the "Birth of Octopuses" unfolds with a studied langour, from blue water pools to the shadows of young girls in flower, but especially in fever.

It all starts in a hot summer with a water ballet, a microcosm perhaps symbolizing a society in which we must comply with the actions of others to integrate. Marie, fascinated by the sensual Floriane, a too-carnal rebel, in following her gradually enters her solitary world, and falls fatally in love. Some people do not attract friendship. In contrast to the Lolita femme fatale who hypnotizes her, friend Anne suddenly seems too childish, too bulky, in a word disposable. It is not easy to read the mysterious emotional traps of fifteen-year-olds. Alternately willing slave, then tough, Marie ends up without brakes on an emotional roller coaster, digging among the rubbish of the object of her desires or holding forth ecstatically on a bed about the importance of the ceiling in human life.

As if it were only mental, and entirely contained in these young minds in turmoil, this world is strangely devoid of adults - especially parents - except for a grandmother and her little hairy dog 'Max'. On this canvas Celine Sciamma explores the pangs of adolescence with an interesting staging; rather sober, not a little reminiscent of the geometric line of achievements by Lucrecia Martel. The "Birth of Octopuses" is still not a perfect movie. A little heavy with the rhythm of 'made in Femis', weighted with tired scenes, the impact as tenuous as a current of air, it is saved by some great moments, such as those which capture solitude in the midst of a crowd, and by the promising actresses.

Pauline Acquart, touched by cinematic grace, looks like a sister to the wounded Charlotte Gainsbourg in "l'Effrontée" by Claude Miller. With an bluesy air, Celine Sciamma masterfully filmed what Americans call "Shoe Gazing", the teenage art of watching the end of their shoes for hours of sulking or dreaming - this picture of course does that with a wave of electro.

Obviously, these girls dangerously evoke "Virgin Suicides" by Sofia Coppola; not quite virgins, or virgin suicides, but rather floating between the octopus and the water lily, just hatched and already buffeted by the river of life.


[tr. Google/DMt.]

[DMt.]

(from european-films.net)

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 school 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 [says you - DMt.] refers to the nascent synchronised swimmers when only their moving legs can be seen under water.

[fish]

Lovely reviews Dave, I hadn't seen the first one before.
Do you have a link to its origins, or the name of the site would do if not?
I'd like to check it out for some other stuff too.
(Always on the lookout for good constructive review writers. )

[DMt.]

Sure, fishy - http://thelword-study.forumactif.com/t2019p15-naissance-des-pieuvres

The original is being quoted in this French forum thread, but no doubt the embed info there will lead to the source.

The reviewer's name is in my post title.

[fish]

Cheers Dave.

That's quite an extensive forum too.
Looks like my French language (non)-skills are in for a bit of a w*rkover.

[DMt.]

If you're using Firefox there's a handy little plugin called gtranslate...

[fish]

If you're using Firefox ...

You're overestimating my intelligence.

[DMt.]

[Interview with Olivier for the site Valkeners Lalucarne.org, very soon after the movie's release]

In the course of the interview, the director and actresses lend themselves uncompromisingly. With the freshness of innocence, they share their experience with the added bonus of a good dose of anti-bullshit!

The young filmmaker was 27 years old. And at this age, having her first film selected at Cannes, "It is a form of strange dream. It's also a lot of pressure", confides the director. "For the rest, and then for that one too. You arrive as someone who has not made even a short film, nobody knows who I am, so we tell ourselves it's easy to be swept aside. Cannes is the hardest audience in the world. In all cases, the legend ... So both what a dream, and yes it's scary. But hey, it went pretty well, so I'm thrilled!"

And so are we! Regarding the genesis, the $1,000 question that everyone asks: Where does the title come from?

Celine says: "For me the octopus, it's jealousy, desire, the physical manifestation of feelings - contradictory, sometimes - it's the little monster that sits in the hollow belly and that manifests itself in a somewhat sprawling way, who throws her ink ... And suddenly, the first time you fall in love, this is the time at which the octopus arrives; for our three characters, really, it is the birth of the octopus. "

This is the personification of lust and love ...

"Yes! It could be called birth of desire actually ..."

And why did you choose the milieu of synchronized swimming?

Celine: "First, because it is a sport that has fascinated me for a long time. I found it in adolescence, a little under the same conditions as heroin, and when I get into a fiction about adolescence, it was obvious to me, I plunged back into that field. In addition, visually, it is a sport that I really wanted to film. It's a colorful world, the physical effort. There was a real place of staging. And besides, this is a sport that is "reserved" for girls, and suddenly, produces a true discourse on femininity. There are all these areas of ratio and appearance, when we smile, when it displays an exuberant femininity, there's not a hair out of place, this is the effort to erase, and then in the "submarine" world, in "underground ", it moves, it works hard, it's physical, it is sacrifice, and this is not shown on the surface. The parallel between the feelings, adolescence, womanhood and the sport works well... "

And for you, the parallel was clear from the outset, when writing? Or is it that the choice of synchronized swimming was obvious because your memories of adolescence led you here, and it came after?

Celine: "It was more the parallel between the issues of femininity and the sport that seemed to me obvious; now, the symbolism has really accentuated during filming, because suddenly, you put the camera under water, and we can see ... It's much more eloquent than what we had ever dreamed ...It has been radicalized. The link between the sport and the discourse was radicalized progressively. "

On precisely synchronized swimming, the water figures were actually executed by you, Adele?

Adele: "Yes, I was not doubled. I learned with a synchronized swimming coach. I learned all surface movements, arm movements, and then for once, it was work, because I spent like 40 hours of rehearsals to learn what's in the film. So on the surface, I do exactly what the other girls do. I love learning, it's still an adventure, when you learn it for a movie. When I said "I should learn synchronized swimming for the film", I was a beginner too, not that I really wanted to put myself in a kind of practical underwater and pretend that I do, I wanted to learn! But as Céline says, what's weird with this sport, its incredible physical effort, it's exhausting, and at the same time, we have not made ​​efforts to show. Underwater, it's very pervasive, it becomes agitated, and the surface is very rigid, very controlled. It was really an adventure ...Now, I do not hurl in sync to make it a career! I do not think you can make careers elsewhere! "(Laughs)

Exactly, career level, projects?

Adele: "We continue our studies and then we'll see."

Although this is essentially a film about - but without sentimentality - the story of three girls, who are considering three wishes, very different, three issues; films about girls in general, seem to lack imagination he in the movie business since the labeling is still appropriate, young actresses receiving proposals for similar projects. Nothing very exciting in itself!

For Adele, it is also very clear: "It is true that the cinema is really my thing, I love it! It's my passion, but I do not want to get on stuff that I would not defend ... The shit after what's done, basically! We've already had proposals but still there's nothing where I would say, "yeah, why not". "

Louise intervenes: "I have some difficulty speaking of other projects, because we we're still there, right there! For us it is almost just the beginning. It is in the middle but it is not out yet. For me it is impossible to think that after this I will not have seen it going to give, not been there ... "

And Celine: "I have some writing projects with other directors, for other directors, and above all I expect the end of this story. Because the object that follows is necessarily linked to the career of this one for me, its meeting with the public. It's a bit difficult to project myself into the future without knowing how all this is sanctioned. I mean, here, the critical reception is good, the film exists, it is rather favorable to embark on a second film, but for now, I have no specific project. Anyway, there's a good return with the public, it's going well, people are intrigued, people remain passionate about the movie so it's not bad, it's positive. "

Pauline, silent and unobtrusive, Louise, who spoke thoughtfully, Adele, talkative and comely, with true honesty defend the movie Celine offered them. They also consider themselves lucky to have all three landed on the film. But how?

Adele: "We have all three a different route. Pauline was cast in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, a wild casting, and it was found ok together on the cast, and Louise, she had answered an ad in the "Studio Magazine". "

Pauline: "Actually I'd been cast in another movie (Like Father, Like daughter), but I had not been chosen. And then I was recalled for the octopus ... "

Adele: "I'd done a film before, The Devils, 5 years ago, and suddenly I knew the casting director, and that's how I found myself on the casting list. When I read the script, it was very well written, there was almost a visual world. There was an atmosphere that emerged from the scenario. Celine told us that as a writer, after she had written without necessarily thinking then to the stage, suddenly the story is very rich ... "

"And very true!", said Louise, "But I know the first thing that I really liked about the scenario is that the further I advanced, the more I read, the more I thought, what is written is what I have felt several times in fact! This is just super! Sometimes in the script, I read things saying such-and-such, but I thought exactly the same! It happened like that! Not all, of course. The story, that of my character, is not mine, but the feelings that were behind, they were very noticeable in the scenario, and that's what really touched me, made me really want to make this film. "

Fortunately, since about the response to the announcement:

Louise: "I myself do not know why I said yes! I do theater, and that's what I loved, at base, and I sent it, but really, I do not know why! I felt like I wanted to see what was behind this ... But it's stupid, because I could have come across a rotten scenario! That's what I tell myself every time! It's true, I would have perhaps not done it then, but suddenly I was lucky ... I do not know myself, I can not explain why I said yes... But I have been lucky!"

Concerning the age of protagonists, Pauline, Louise and Adele were respectively aged 15, 16 and 17 during the filming ...
The age of their characters?

Celine: "More or less, yes ..."

Louise: "I've never really asked the question of how old they were, it is a time of life, but in some people, it can happen in 15 years, as at 14 as at 16, is a period. Age was not even necessary I find ... "

But being as close to the characters in the reality of adolescence helps build the character, right?

Adele: "We worked for a month, all together, and we did exercises to build bridges between our characters. Then we also worked hard to build our characters. For example, for me, Floriane, we worked a lot on how to find a body, a process, a look. So it was a job that was still a work in composition, concentration ... "

Celine: "We worked a lot on the outskirts of the scenario, but we did not stage it, did not repeat things...This was going very far, to work together with a physical ambiguity, which exceeds stages of domestication, practically, so that once you arrive on the set you are not disadvantaged compared to how to tell the attraction, a latent eroticism, this kind of thing ... We were clearing all the ground there ... "

Precisely for this latent eroticism, desire ... This is an urban myth that girls often try to kiss each other ... But for you, Pauline, for that first movie kiss, to kiss a girl was easier than if you had had to kiss a guy?

Awkward silence of the youngest of the band ... And Adele to intervenes to save her: "I've kissed Warren, I can say that it's easier...kissing Pauline!"

This is without the difficulties that the male would have coming to him if he had been rescued!

And the director adding "Ah, this is a little straight, but he is a hit among boys, Warren is something sick! His air of Ryan Philippe, it works well!"

General laughter, before finally Pauline speaks: "It's a scene I was quite apprehensive about, it's true, but ultimately, it was still easier than what I had thought."

Adele: "At the time what was the hardest, finally, was to move forward ..."

Celine: "And we did that twice. It's so stressful, an impressive moment, we do not so much need to be transposed into the character, because either way it is moving. So finally, this is the moment when we least need to ask "but what does she feel at that moment?". This is anyway a cult enough time."

For the deflowering scene, it was a conscious decision not to fuck, to wait for later in the film? The kiss is almost more significant than the loss of virginity ...

Celine: "If there was kissing, then there was tenderness and it became an explicit love scene and for me, the scene told very conflicting feelings. It tells a balance of power - which is reversed - between the two characters. There is love on the one hand, sacrifice, and then on the other side, there is this injunction to lose her virginity, and the exploitation of someone. We needed to tell it all in one scene. And if there was love, it would say something completely different. I wanted to treat this clinically, because I did not want to be in voyeurism, had to find the right distance, and not cut the sequence, get close-ups, use widgets; I wanted to be in a kind of purity of the moment and the right place, in a scene like that. I do not know all the films, but a priori, it is rather unusual to invent the staging of a moment like that. It begs lots of questions ...It was difficult to turn - actually extremely annoying! - But I had to really think, meditate. Should not turn things we will not use, be economical, plans, plan value, hence sequence shot, and try to make some catches. It is a scene that was not repeated at all, and she [Adele] did a little burst, and this is an emotional moment. That is not a moment that you can script."

Adele: "We in fact took shelter behind what Celine said, and what is also done, ie, that it was extremely modest how it was filmed. So suddenly, it was like we said, "it's nothing, anyway, we're pretending." Finally, it made ​​us more afraid to do the kiss scene, because it was so true. But in fact, at the time, it was really moving."

About the script, was it changed, and if so, how? The end was already as is?

Celine: "The film has radicalized progressively, but it is still very close to the original script. Each approach has been taken further, there was more dialogue in the screenplay, in terms of pace, it is more elliptical ... There have been no major changes, I was not going back on things, it was one way we cranked it up."

You are aware that the film will become iconic to rural lesbians?

"I hope so!"

For, while there's a swarm of films about guys, very few films deal with the subject of a female perspective, especially as intelligently as this.

"And it's always fables, (When Night Is Falling), species of daydreams. There's Fucking Amal which is fine [ DMt. ], but in fact there is very, very little else. Anyway it is also the fact that there is really a gap of representation, fiction on these trips that relied on desire to make the film and to do so offbeat; that is not respecting the time of affirmation, not at all dealing with this stuff a little "heroic" to say "I'm like that," not to treat when it emerges into consciousness and suddenly twisting the blow to the movies coming out, and this film ends when all the other films on the subject begin ...I hope from the genre of the film coming out, 'gay movie', I hope it will still find a gay audience, because I know it might be a little disorienting compared to the expected shape."

By filling a niche where demand exists, the film should not have this problem! Girls are made of lack of representation, a bit neglected by the seventh art, female adolescence as a cocoon, a taboo which it should approach ...The film stops when all the others begin, as we have yet to taste a little too, having to leave them, finally, just as early.

Celine: "The idea was to leave open trajectories. And in my meetings with the public, I notice that everyone takes up the story. Some say "For me it's a done deal, the heroine is going to love girls", others say "no, it's very open, maybe yes, maybe no", and still others are convinced that she will pursue the course of heterosexuality ... The remaining ambiguous character is that of Floriane / Adele, a prisoner of her image, to define who... we do not know if it was just 'an experience', or an experience of Liberation itself, almost an act of desperation, and if she will be able to go beyond and be really ... For me, at the end of the film, life begins, so it's a result, a higher force, that will determine their destinies"

And return in 10 years, for example, about the characters, as Denys Arcand did with The Decline of the American Empire & The Barbarian Invasions?

Celine: "I think it would really say that I have accumulated a lot of failures! No, but it is clear, there's a temptation to repeat, anyway; it's attractive, but I like the idea that the story was good enough on its own. "