A black and white dream in a color sleep. You can't understand why Marie is so upset? Why Anne is so fool and why Florian is so alone? But you can feel all of them. There is no twist in the story but It is sincere. You never see the girls' parents but you know why you can't see them, you know where they are . As if they don't exist because they don't have any effect. You see the absolute black color in the movie but you want to close your eyes. Yes, water lilies love water even though there is no clear water in their land.

If you were looking for some kind of voyeuristic, sexy, lesbian teen drama...zip up your pants because this isn't it. Or (for whatever reason) you were looking for a synchronized swimming movie, this isn't it either.The plot is a familiar one: 3 very different teenage girls in a French suburb deal with their sexuality and the loss of innocence. I thought it was a brilliant touch to not include any parents or adults in this movie. There's no "unique" way to approach the subject matter because anyone who has ever been a teenager has lived through this movie...all the uncertainty, the awkwardness, the naivety, the myths of growing up. The whole point of a coming-of-age film is that its a predictable cliché...because that's exactly what adolescence is.There's no unpretentious way to say this: Naissance des Pieuvres isn't a movie at all, it's a film. And a beautiful one, at that. There's this looseness about the way the movie rolls that feels so natural...it's what all coming-of-age films should be like. Another reviewer here mentioned that it had a very Sofia Coppola feel and that's exactly right. That feeling of dreamy teenage idleness is persistent and strangely keeps the film together. There are few movies that make you feel like floating and sinking at the same time. Water Lilies did it for me. Every scene and every sound (the soundtrack is BRILLIANT) in this film was so deliberate and so beautifully acted.If absolutely nothing convinces you, at least watch the last 5 minutes of this movie. I've replayed it at least a dozen times and I don't completely understand why. It's hypnotic and arguably one of the best movie endings of modern film.9/10.

Emotionally brutal tale of teenage sexual yearnings. Pauline Acquart is a gawky 14 or 15 year old who obsesses over the slightly older, supposedly sexually promiscuous captain of her school's synchronized swimming team (Adele Haenel). Meanwhile, Acquart's tubby best friend (Louise Blanchere) obsesses over a boy, Francois, who is himself trying to bang Haenel. The film sometimes seems just a tiny bit sleazy because it really does focus a lot on these horny teenage girls, and, as it's mostly told from the point of view of Acquart, it sometimes seems obsessed with Haenel's body. But whatever prurient reasons one might have for watching this, it's impossible to deny how deeply it bores into the psyche of Acquart. And, Christ, does she give a fantastic performance. It also has a lot of insight into Haenel's character. You kind of hate her, just because she's so damn manipulative and cruel toward Acquart. She almost immediately recognizes what Acquart wants, as she's so used to getting the same attitude from the men in her life, and she uses it to her advantage. In one particularly painful sequence, she grinds on Acquart on the dance floor, but only because she knows some douchebag guy will find it hot. The two girls are just about to kiss for the first time, and Acquart opens her eyes to find Haenel has backed into the guy behind her and started to grind on him instead. The Blanchere subplot, on the other hand, is somewhat less successful. She's kind of dumb and childish (for what it's worth, Acquart, who has presumably been her friend since they were kids, is starting to feel the same; Blanchere is kind of like a safe place to back off to when her relationship with Haenel gets to be too frustrating). The culmination of her part of the film, though, is pretty satisfying. This is definitely one of the best films I've ever seen about teenagers. Despite the fact that I'm a straight guy, Water Lilies dragged some very painful memories from my own teen years to the surface.

The significance of French title of this film, "La Naissance des Pieuvres" which literally means "The Birth of the Octopuses", is rather obscure, so it is perhaps not surprising that it has been marketed in English-speaking countries as "Water Lilies". The "lilies" of the English title are three teenage girls, Marie, Anne and Floriane, who are members of a synchronised swimming team based in the Paris suburbs, and the film is a "coming-of-age" drama about the development of their first sexual feelings.One feature of the film, perhaps unusual for a film of this type, is that it concentrates exclusively on relationships between the young people themselves. We see nothing of their parents or their teachers, and very little of the adult world at all. The three girls are very different in appearance, and are portrayed as being very different in character. The shy, retiring Marie is slim and petite and appears to be the youngest of the three. Anne is something of a plain Jane, Floriane a glamorous blonde who is very popular with the boys. The three, together with a handsome male swimmer named Francois, are involved in what might be described as a love-quadrilateral.Anne has fallen in love with Francois, but he is smitten with Floriane, who seems to return his affections, although he is by no means her only male admirer. Indeed, not all of Floriane's admirers are male, because Marie has a crush on her attractive friend. The film charts the way in which their friendship develops; at first it seems that Floriane is simply using Marie as a convenient excuse when she is in fact going out to meet boys; her parents presumably object to her dating boys, but have no objection to her going out with female friends. Later, however, we realise that, despite Floriane's image as the sexy, popular girl who is always the centre of male attention, she actually reciprocates Marie's feelings. The film reverses some conventional stereotypes about sexuality. Anne, with her short hair and rather chunky figure, looks typically "butch", yet she is the only one of the three main characters who is unambiguously heterosexual, whereas the more conventionally feminine Marie and the glamorous Floriane are lesbian, or at least bisexual.Coming-of-age films are common enough, although most of them tend to avoid the controversial topic of teenage lesbianism. "Water Lilies", however, deals with its subject-matter in a sensitive way, with three very good performances from its three leading actresses, Pauline Acquart, Adele Haenel and Louise Blachere. The relationships between the characters, especially that between Marie and Floriane, are complex, and capable of a number of interpretations. (Is Floriane, for example, simply using Marie for sex, or does she genuinely have romantic feelings for her? Could Floriane's sluttish behaviour with Francois and the other boys be just a device to hide her lesbian feelings from the outside world? Or even to hide them from herself?) This was the first film made by its young director Celine Sciamma (only 27 at the time); on this basis she must be regarded as a highly promising newcomer. 7/10