A few words about Water Lilies...

a ponderous little French film about queer sex, deviance, and synchronized swimming (part I)

by Punch

Yesterday I saw a weird little French movie called Water Lilies. Roughly, Water Lilies is about teenaged sexuality, synchronized swimming, and obsession. (By virtue of being French, it is impossible to tell whether the insidious, abstracted violence of the film is of national or thematic origin. One often feels menaced by French films, so unlike American films in their pernicious silences, the odd cuteness of their suburbs, the foreignness of their women’s beauty.) I want to write about the film here, however, because it is queer, but also because it says something a little different about children’s sexuality than most coming-of-age films.

In American Pie, that epitome of teenaged sexual trauma, a desperate Jim Levenstein humps a warm apple pie and is caught by his parents (his father, presumably, understands Jim’s impulses and gives him a kind talking to, for all intents and purposes as if this is perfectly normal male, heterosexual behavior). In Water Lilies, Marie steals Floriane’s trash after their first night together. Back in the (apparently total) privacy of her room, Marie rips open the garbage bag, searching for some physical reminder of Floriane. She finds a browned, wizened apple core which, after only passing hesitation, she bites into and chews with a mixture of wonder and regret. 1

The abject as talisman and marker of (queer) obsession has many articulations, from the ABBA poo stolen and placed in a vial in The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, to the urine stolen and put in a vial in Scott Heim’s In Awe, amongst others (see also, John Waters). (Also, see homophone, “vile,” and the poetically related “violate,” “inviolate,” and “violence.”) To preserve and/or ingest the abject is often the only way of being close with one’s desired object precisely because these talismans are leavings, excrements not to be missed or even discussed. They can be stolen and harbored with impunity.

In Water Lilies, there are no parents 2, and, therefore, no hysterical interventions (as in American Pie and other representations of teenage sexuality). But, more importantly, without parents there are no secrets and no hidden knowledge. Instead, there is the vaguely menacing prospect of boys’ sexuality (the closing shot of the movie makes this clear: the boys’ (nonsynchronized) swim team, their faces covered in what appear to be their own underpants, gyrate in half-speed under dancehall lights, performing acts of mock aggression against each other’s mostly naked bodies, while Floriane, eyes closed and face turned upwards, dances alone). But it is still a world of girls – girls who fight, who comment on each other’s bodies, girls who thwart each other’s advances, girls who fuck each other. Writer/director Céline Sciamma seems to suggest that it is not parents who regulate children, but themselves. The inmates are running the prison.

Which begs the question, as that phrase always has: Why? The easy answer is that that’s how norms work – we learn to regulate ourselves, become docile. But doesn’t queerness disrupt this idea? If norms worked, queerness wouldn’t. Water Lilies reminds us that there is always something left – shame, abjection, the wizened apple – after punishment, after regulation.



1 The apple remains a potent metonym for innocence lost. It means knowledge and deviance, a magnetic, mesmerizing dialectic. That its consumption also initiates expulsion from Utopia may explain its use in films about “growing up,” in which kids, through physical sex or a newly charged sexual landscape, move from the Eden of childhood to the dystopia of adulthood. Yet its use in Water Lilies and other films about queer desire suggests that it is also what is left, a remnant of sin – childhood, too, is dystopic. Marie’s secreted apple does not initiate her into a sanctioned maturity. Instead, it marks a fringe of childhood where policing fails. The classic symbol of knowledge and deviance is also a symbol of abjection, not because it initiates expulsion but because it marks it.

2 Literally, in the sense that no parents ever appear on screen. But they do exist in the characters’ lives. Floriane claims that she needs Marie to legitimately get her out of the house to meet a boyfriend, but as the film progresses this seems less a reality and more Floriane’s manipulation. The cinematically absent parents are of little concern to the teenagers, though they never comment on why this is the case. In other words, the film seems to deliberately avoid implicating parents or even to admit their influence. Unlike Jim’s parents in American Pie, who catch him doing something that can only be funny if he is caught (lest it turn into tragedy, like Floriane’s discarded apple), the parents of the girls in Water Lilies do not exist to catch their children in (decidedly more dangerous and compromising) acts of sexual deviance. What their children have learned to hide is not humiliation or confusion, but desire.