『A delicate portrayal of teenage girls’ emotions and sexuality, caught between friendship and growing up』
🎥 Film Overview
🎬 Title: Les Filles ne savent pas nager (English title: Girls Can’t Swim, 2000)
🌍 Country: 🇫🇷 France
🎞️ Genre: Drama / Coming-of-age / Friendship
⏳ Runtime: Approximately 90 minutes
📢 Director: Anne-Sophie Birot
👩💼 Cast: Isild Le Besco – Gwen
Karen Alyx – Lise
🧩 In-Depth Story Exploration (Spoilers)
🌊 Friendship in Contrast
- Main Characters:
- Lise: A red-haired girl living near Paris, mourning the recent death of her father. She feels isolated and finds solace in watching the fish at an aquarium.
- Gwen: A blonde girl from a seaside village in Brittany, dealing with her fisherman father's alcoholism. She seeks control over her life through sexual experiences with boys.
- Setting: The story unfolds when Lise visits Gwen’s seaside village in Brittany for summer vacation. Their long-standing friendship begins to fracture as each girl faces different crises—Lise’s grief and Gwen’s sexual recklessness.
- Title Metaphor: “Girls Can’t Swim” symbolizes teenage girls who have not yet learned how to navigate or survive the rough sea of life—lost, unsteady, and powerless in their search for direction.
👭 The Breakdown of Friendship and Sexual Awakening
This film observes, with stark honesty, how friendship between two girls begins to crack and eventually dissolve as they cross the threshold into adulthood.
- The Collapse of Balance: Lise and Gwen have long mirrored each other. But as they enter late adolescence, Lise faces the internal crisis of loss, while Gwen embraces external change through sexual liberation. These divergent paths erode their shared understanding, and the distance between them grows wider.
- Sex as Liberation vs. Isolation: For Gwen, relationships with boys are a form of escape and control in a chaotic home life. Lise, on the other hand, retreats inward after her father’s death, unable to understand or join Gwen’s outward rebellion. Gwen’s apparent freedom only deepens Lise’s sense of alienation.
- Jealousy and Imitation: Lise envies Gwen’s seemingly easy freedom and even tries to imitate her—approaching Gwen’s boyfriend and copying her behavior. This shows a desperate attempt by a lost teenager to rebuild her identity through the mirror of friendship.
🤫 Grief and the Language of Silence
Lise’s pain forms the emotional foundation of the film’s darker tone.
- Communication Breakdown: Lise suffers from her father’s death but cannot fully share or be comforted by Gwen. Gwen, preoccupied with her own family issues, fails to empathize. Their friendship survives only through letters exchanged, but when they finally meet, they fail to communicate genuine emotion.
- The Body in Pain: Lise’s emotional suffering manifests as self-destructive behavior. The film captures, with subtle honesty, how adolescent psychological pain often transforms into physical expressions—reckless acts, plunging into water, or confused sexual behavior.
🤝 Gender and Confused Sexual Expression
Some international reviews have miscategorized this film as a “lesbian film,” but that interpretation is inaccurate.
- Homoerotic Subtext: The girls’ friendship is intense, intimate, and borderless. Lise’s jealousy of Gwen’s boyfriend and her fixation on Gwen carry a subtle homoerotic tension (subtext).
- ‘Queer’ Coming-of-Age Lens: However, the core of the film is not about defining sexual orientation, but about how gender roles and sexual desire become fluid and confusing during adolescence. Lise’s actions stem less from sexual curiosity and more from a need to fill emotional emptiness.
Les Filles ne savent pas nager is a poignant coming-of-age story about two girls struggling to stay afloat in the turbulent waters of adolescence. Like girls who cannot swim, they reach for each other for support, only to nearly drown in the process. The film portrays how growth and loss can sometimes mean the end of friendship.
🎯 Personal Rating (Subjective)
💕 Love Scene Intensity: ♥♥
⭐ Rating: ★
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