Girls Can't Swim R1 Isild Le Besco

R1-originaali, ei suomitekstejä. Tekstit englanniksi.,

For years, teenagers Gwen and Lise have enjoyed spending their summer vacations together on the Brittany coast, but this summer is different. Gwen's newfound interest in the opposite sex has caused a rift between the two, leading both girls to reexamine their friendship.

• Director ? : ? Anne-Sophie Birot
• Media Format ? : ? Color, Dolby, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Run time ? : ? 1 hour and 42 minutes
• Release date ? : ? September 24, 2002
• Actors ? : ? Isild Le Besco, Karen Alyx, Pascale Bussires, Pascal Elso, Marie Rivire
• Subtitles: ? : ? English
• ASIN ? : ? B00006FD9Y
• Writers ? : ? Anne-Sophie Birot, Christophe Honor
• Number of discs ? : ? 1

I'm frequently impressed at how well French filmmakers capture the tumultuous emotions of adolescence. While most American films try for "popcorn pulp" treatments of teenage life - light, cliched situations played out by kids who seem to have been cast for how well they'd grace the cover of Seventeen or YM Magazines rather than for any acting talent - Girls Can't Swim (or Les Filles Ne Savent Pas Nager, as the French call it) offers serious explorations of the minds and passions of its two fifteen-year-old protagonists, played with intense passion and sincerity by its stars. The basic premise is nothing new: Gwen and Lise have grown up best of friends, and Lise and her family spend every summer vacation at the beach town where Gwen lives. But this summer, Gwen is less inclined to spend time with Lise as she is with the local boys, who are eager to take advantage in her newfound interest in sex. Lise, whose estranged father has recently died, begins replacing Gwen as favorite in the eyes of Gwen's unemployed father. And the intimate friendship they have treasured all their lives unravels with each new conflict.
Visually, the movie is absolutely beautiful. The acting by the two stars is superb, and the characters they play are beautifully developed - fully believable adolescents. Isild Le Besco deftly captures the desperation behind Gwen's freewheeling and promiscuous experimentations with sex, and Karen Alyx infuses Lise with an almost dangerous, introverted fire, remeniscent of Melanie Lynskey in Heavenly Creatures. Many of the supporting roles were very well-played too, especially Sandrine Blancke as Lise's older sister Vivianne and Pascal Elso as Gwen's father Alain. And unlike the vast majority of cinema I've seen, this film makes a marked distinction between sex and nudity. Yes, the girls get naked from time to time; yet, with the exception of one important scene which functions as a major turning point in the story, nearly none of the nudity is involved in the sex. The love/hate duality of the relationships among the various characters within the film is honest and believable, and the "disfunctional"-ness of the two families (and their self-destructive attempts to escape from their own lives) is well-calculated.
I can forgive all but one of the film's flaws (lack of any male characters even half as well-defined as the female ones, weak dialogue, lack of narrative coherence, etc.) on account of its strengths. But there is one I cannot forgive. At the climax of the story, a catastrophic event occurs that threatens to destroy the friendship permanently, and the film ends there. There is no aftermath, no resolution of any kind. It merely cuts off at the climax. The effect is tantamount to ending Empire Strikes Back the moment Darth Vader drops his famous bombshell about Luke Skywalker's true pedigree. All the more so because not only do you never find out what this does to the two girls and their futures, you never find out if the catastrophe that happened was purely an accident, as it seems on the surface, or if Lise had been planning it. It's one of those violations of dramatic structure that can't go by unnoticed or unobjected-to.
I'd say rent before you buy it, and judge for yourself if the powerful performances it has going for it make it worth buying despite the fact it's missing its third act.

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