The first film in my
analysis of the
films of Celine Sciamma, is the coming-of-age drama, Water
Lilies. In this debut, Sciamma’s shot composition weaves a cinematic
tapestry that heralds her as an up-and-coming auteur. Inter-stitched with a
gender and sexually fluid color palette, Sciamma constructs a female gaze that
captures the tumultuously turbulent acrimony of adolescence, where bourgeoning
desire threatens to unravel fragile friendships. Water Lilies is the
first in a loose trilogy about the slow transition out of childhood (along with
Tomboy, and Girlhood). The production of this freshman film
supports the consistent albeit mixed feminist messaging the director will be
known for; however, upon greater reflection, some of the film’s specific
sequences and overall choices may not have aged well in hindsight.
PLOT
When young Marie goes to
a synchronized swim meet to support her best friend, she unexpectedly becomes
enthralled with Floriane (Adele Haenel). As Marie gets more and more drawn in
by Floriane’s charm and attention, she begins to question her sexuality,
straining the relationship she has with her best friend who is also on a
journey of sexual discovery. This film reminds us that regardless of the
romantic path one takes, no matter how many twists and turns it makes, all
roads lead to heartache.
HISTORICAL CONTEXT
To
understand the historical impact of Water Lilies, both the production
and the film’s setting need to be interrogated. Due to films being a human
cultural product, movies become infused with the time period in which they are
created. This can be seen in the technology that is used on screen, filming
techniques, pop cultural references used, all the way down to the film grain
and sound mixing. Each of these aspects of the industry, perceptibly or
imperceptibly, leave a trace as to the film’s historical affect, like a smudgy
fingerprint on glass. Depending on the
type of film being made, this can either be an avenue or a barrier to the story
being told. Sciamma’s first film taking place contemporaneously with the time
period of the film’s production, allows it to avoid any complicated temporal
anachronisms that are possible in period pieces or future (set) films. Thus, Water
Lilies production and the film’s setting represent French Independent
cinema, and the sexual politics of the late 2000’s
Gay
and sexual politics of the late 2000’s
During the writing and
the development of Water Lilies there were transformative events in the
LGBTQAI+ community. Sciamma, herself a lesbian GenXer, understands the
difficulty in navigating the sexual politics of an identity that, during the
time that she was a teenager, was not only less accepted, but abhorred. Thus,
given this context, Water Lilies is both subversive for the time, and a
beacon for the rights, representation and acceptance that was to come.
The
gender and sexual politics of the late 00’s was a period of growing pains. The white
heterosexual hegemony was weaning slightly. Thus, fearful of losing that
power, there was an attempt at the clawing rollback of gay rights in the states
(California passing Proposition 8 making Gay marriage illegal) and abroad. In
France, civil partnerships had been made legal in 1999 which, at the time, felt
like a segregationist tactic of “separate but equal.” On the surface, these
bills would give those that filed for domestic partnerships the same rights as
a heterosexual couple outside of the name. However, these exclusionary policies
were not only used as a social buffer between gays, lesbian and “the straights”-
it outwardly misrepresented a cultural tacit rejection of anything that was non
heterosexual.
In
Sociology, there is a term called cultural lag. This is the understanding that
when a behavior, object or idea is introduced or implemented into a society or
culture, there is an unspecified amount of time during which cultural
acceptance is developed before it is implemented into the Bureaucratic
processes of the social structure.
Technology is usually the easiest example of this: the internet existed before
it became a cultural necessity. Yet, because of the power imbalance between
those who hold high status positions in valued social institutions (military
Governments and Economy) and the people whom they are supposed to serve, there
is an extra barrier to the implementation of change regardless of its cultural
acceptance. This is the impasse that sexual politics found itself in during the
late 2000’s.
Even in 2007, most of the world’s population was
either supportive of or neutral towards another person’s sexuality. Yet, those in
power were resistant to the will of their people and consistently pushed back against
the efforts of sexual equality. This pushback was usually couched in the same
rhetoric of neutrality using it to keep individuals in the proverbial “closet”
or “on the DL" to limit public presentations of their identity; effectively
using the rhetoric of ambivalence as a shield from criticism. Though, it is hard
to accept that anyone who goes out of their way to deny the personhood of
another group is uncaring. Therefore, the 2007-2008 resistance to gay rights
was the product of the powerful’s persnickety perniciousness to shore up their
worldview in the levees of institutional authority, indicating not only their discrimination
but admitting to the fragility of their own values.
This tug of war against the
people and the powerful over sexual politics has caused a “seesawing” effect on
the validation of Non heterosexual identities and everything under the LGBTQAI+
banner. In addition to the 2008 California law mentioned above, the US federal
government was also under the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), signed into law
back in 1997 that defined marriage as only between one man and one woman. This
was later attempted to be codified by the Bush administration in 2004 with the
Marriage protection Amendment that died in congress. Later, the Obama
Administration supported bills in congress that would weaken DOMA, eventually being
reversed through the US Supreme Court decision in Obergefell V. Hodges
that saw Gay marriage legalized in 2015. It was with this landmark decision
that there was finally an alignment between the law and the cultural acceptance
of sexual identities outside of the vanilla hetero/cis normativity.
However, as the United States has flirted with
fascism with the presidency of Donald Trump, we’ve witnessed the end of federal
protections for reproductive rights for women. Roe v. Wade being repealed just
shy of its 50-year anniversary. The court (with 3 new Trump appointees at the
time) ultimately overturned the 1973 decision by questioning its rationalization
around privacy. A rationalization that was also used in Obergefell due
to the precedence established in Roe; making the former now vulnerable
to appeal. This is happening while a
majority of Americans still support Gay rights and same sex relationships. Yet,
recent and relentless Conservative attacks have fueled public skepticism and waned
support for trans and nonbinary people
in the US.
Being of French nationality,
it is reasonable to assume that Sciamma wasn’t impacted by these contradictions
in the States. Although, historically France has been far more progressive than
the US when it comes to issues of sexuality and gender, still, between 2012 and
2013 the battle between the conservative and socialist parties in France were
ambivalent about same sex marriage; ultimately solidifying France as a liberal
nation with the passage of the Gay marriage bill in 2013, 6 years after the
release of the film.
As mentioned at the
beginning of this section, because Water Lilies drew upon the director’s
own experiences, the revelation of attraction and expression is inherently
framed from a Gen X perspective during a far more conservative time, even in
France. Thus, a lot of the film, especially the intimacy between Marie and
Floriane, happens behind closed doors, in locker rooms, and secret places in
public parks. While this is typical of youthful sexual transgressions regardless
of identity (in part because young adults do not have access to many private spaces
without parental or adult supervision) these practices were necessary in the
gay and lesbian subculture during times when expression of such an identity was
met with criminal prosecution, violence and even death. Sciamma deftly
illustrates not only the confusion of an emerging unbridled sexuality, but the
added vexation of navigating the underground codes of sexual identities and
behaviors that are not accepted by the cisgendered vanilla sex breeders.
Production
The
inspiration for Water Lilies came from Sciamma’s experiences with the
sport of synchronized swimming. The original French title, which translates
into “birth of the octopus” was later changed for an international release.
Sciamma felt that the term ‘water lilies’ was an insightful analogy to the way
that female synchronized swimmers need to present themselves: athletic and
strong but with a performative femininity. Water lilies being both of the soil
and water, thriving in the silt of rivers and lakes, with resiliency hardy
enough to break the surface tension of the water to flower above. In either
case, with water lilies or French synchronized swimmers, the real labor underwater
is never seen.
Being
an independent and a considerably low budget film, not much else is known about
the production of the film, beyond the knowledge that, sometime after this film
wrapped, Sciamma and Haenel began a romantic relationship. In hindsight, considering
that Sciamma and Haenel met on the set of Water Lilies, and the age gap
between them (Sciamma was between 29-30 and Haenel was 17-18 years old at the
time they met), calls for a reexamination of the film through the framing of
power.
Regardless of when the romantic
relationship between Sciamma and Haenel began, the initial cultivation of their
relationship was not one of equal power. And while these power dynamics are
indeed fluid and can change, a relationship that has a foundation of an
imbalance of power is hard to disrupt, especially when that imbalance of power
in a professional relationship is reinforced by the imbalance of the age gap
between them. Consider the difficulties in the shift in power dynamics between
parents and children, and how even adult children kowtow to parents and their
desires when that subjugation is no longer required, nor beneficial. This
imbalance became foundational in the initial relationship between Sciamma and
Haenel that complicates a feminist reading of the film. An example of this is
Sciamma’s thoughts on the sex and nudity of the characters that are supposed to
be below the age of consent (even though all of the actors portraying the teens
were over the age of 18):
"In
the casting, I told each girl the whole scenario, including that scene in which
one girl deflowers the other. You can't just say to a girl, 'if you're naked,
that's your character.' No, it's her body. So I was always honest. I said that
I would not betray them, that I would not take anything from them, that they
should give me something. By itself. If they wanted to participate, they knew
how far they had to go. I was surprised that they were immediately excited. But
the story was really about them, they felt connected to it. And those parents
were just as excited. They even helped me to lie to the government because I
had given them a clean version of the script to convince them. The parents
supported that story," Sciamma recalled.[1]
On the surface this is very inclusive and provides the
girls with the agency and autonomy to collaboratively create the story that
Sciamma wanted to tell. However, reframe this statement with the knowledge of Sciamma’s
and Haenel’s subsequent relationship, and through this lens, these statements seem
predatory.
Additionally,
using the framing of Sciamma’s and Haenel’s relationship, the praise for the
film becoming the template for a feminist female gaze in filmmaking is also
tainted. Throughout the film, Floriane (Haenel) is the subject of Marie’s
desire, often illustrated through the lens of the camera. Yet, because it is
Sciamma behind the camera, and she is the person whom inevitably chooses which
shots to use from hours of footage, any image that presents Floriane’s
sexuality, regardless of the presumed agency that is presented, again seems predatory.
It is difficult to believe, given both the final product and the history of filmmaking,
that Sciamma wasn’t sexualizing Haenel well-before they became a couple. Thus,
it is odd for a film to be praised for its depiction of girls, women and the
agency afforded to them to express their sexuality, when the person who was
ultimately responsible for constructing that narrative was objectifying one of
them at the same time.
If I can be afforded some
latitude for speculation, one of the reasons that this framing isn’t more
commonly lauded at this film is due to the same sex nature of the relationship.
Currently, as of this writing, allegations of sexual misconduct have been
leveed against author Neil Gaiman. Gaiman (similar to Sciamma and Haenel) began
a relationship with a 20-year-old victim after meeting them at a book signing 2
years prior. Almost instantaneously, Gaiman is “being canceled.”, and
rightfully so. Yet, Sciamma remains a pillar of feminist filmmaking. A partial
explanation for this could be the simplicity of popularity. Gaiman is more
popular than Sciamma and thus garners more public attention. Additionally, the
relationship between Sciamma and Haenel began and ended without attention or
fanfare before social media became a factor in a majority of celebrity lives. Finally,
one cannot discount the additional factor of the common
age gaps and complicated entanglement of same sex relationships; many of which
are based in a foundation of sexual mentorship.
In this context, we can understand how Sciamma’s possible transgressions are
made invisible, but no less problematic.
SOCIAL ANALYSIS
Water
Lilies is a story about the blossoming of sexuality in
teenage girls and the emotional torrent that accompanies its revelation. Many
of the sociological themes that this film encircles are ones of learning, self-discovery
and introspection. Each of the three protagonists have to navigate this new (to
them) gender and sexual landscape, coming to different solutions, conclusions
and revelations between them, themselves and the rest of the world. To understand
this further, the concepts of gender socialization, the eroticization of youth
and the intersections of love and sex need to be examined.
Gender
Socialization
Socialization is rudimentally defined as a
social learning process, begins before birth and contains multitudes: the
learning of both the self, and society; its rules, regulations and ways of acceptable
behavior. This process needs to be engrossingly all-encompassing because it is
used as a mechanism of social control. The internalization of its process and
learned socially acceptable behavior(s) maintains the social order by
constructing a law-abiding productive member of society. Yet, since most
societies value patriarchal and white supremacist rule, the social order that
emerges, and the learning process that is developed to ensure its reproduction,
becomes inherently racist and misogynistic.
Gender
Socialization: the process by which individuals understand what it means to be
male, female, and trans, along the gender spectrum within a particular society.
Some societies see and expand upon the gendered spectrum, while others, most
others, organize around a traditional, exclusionary binary. Through the gender binary, gender stereotypes
and assumptions emerge as concrete facts: boys are boys and girls are girls, to
eventually become men and women. Girls
get the message that their value is chiefly located in their body and their
relationship with boys and men; learning to cultivate their bodies, dreams and
desires around the needs of others. It is from this that they are convinced
they only find worth. If they dare to dream for themselves, they are
consistently sanctioned and pressured to return to behaviors of subservience.
Under such surveillance women lose their
identity, becoming strangers to themselves (de Beauvoir 2011). Any identity
outside of the roles of being wives and mothers is an identity which is
perceived as one that a girl/woman steals for themselves. However, if these two
identity conditions are mandatory and must be fulfilled prior to anything else,
what is then framed as stealing, is instead a conditional perk of incarceration.
Female childhood and adolescence are seething with the rage against their
imprisonment in these roles, often thrashing themselves against the bars of
their social prison, inflicting self-harm (de Beauvoir 2011).
Because girls and women
are valued in their bodies through the binary, the detention of society’s
daughters begins around the subject of sex. Beyond the simple objectification of women as
sex objects or vessels for the next generation (through reproduction) this
valuation frames women’s existence as being in service to others, typically
men. Therefore, all these mechanisms by which girls and women are policed, are for
the benefit of men. Laura Carpenter (2005) discusses this through the prism of
virginity loss.
According to Carpenter
(2005), girls and boys are socialized to perceive virginity differently. While
boys are socialized to see their virginity as a stigma, something that needs to
be gotten rid of as soon as possible, girls are socialized to see their
virginity as a gift. However, it is not a gift that the girls give to
themselves, to indicate body autonomy and agency, but a gift to their
(presumed) heterosexual partner. This places undo attention and value on female
virginity to the point that the perception of a girl/women’s morality is tied
to whether or not they have had sex (Valenti 2009).
Sciamma inverts this
importance of virginity in the film through Floriane, who is a virgin but has a
slutty reputation among boys. When she is no longer able to delay the advances
of one of her many male suitors, and to avoid the humiliation of being discovered
as a virgin, she convinces Marie to deflower her through digital
stimulation/penetration. This non heterosexual act is done in the service of men,
specifically to give Floriane access to male power. Floriane does this without
any reluctance or consideration for Marie’s feelings, which end up being hurt
through Floriane’s emotional manipulation and lack of compassion.
Since women get the
message that their value is in their bodies, girls and women often conclude that
one way to glean power, autonomy and authority is through the patriarchal
bargain- when women lean into patriarchal, and ultimately unequal systems of power
for the stability and security that behavior will provide. This is done in part
through girls and women recognizing their body as currency. Yet, while girls
and women can wrestle away power from men and the patriarchy in general, this
behavior, even though it is framed as a subversion, or a rebellion, it is still
in the service of men. The control that women assert over their heterosexual
partners and the general domestic sphere is purposefully designed to provide
men with women to support them. The patriarchal system conditions men to not be
socialized to a variety of basic domestic duties while sanctioning women more
harshly for those same behaviors. Thus, to avoid being sanctioned by others
(and perceived as a “bad” wife and “mother” the roles from which Society draws
girls and women’s value) many women feel pressure to exhibit control over the home
and participate in this patriarchal bargain; convincing themselves that it is
the only way to access power. This is contrary to the truth that the patriarchal
structure conditions boys and men into a state of arrested development (often framing
girlfriends and wives as “mothers they can fuck”) which then conditions women
to fill/exploit that weakness to gain power that they were denied by virtue of
being girls/women. Then, because this system is also misogynistic, even when
women do the very things society tells them they need to do to gain value, they
are still sanctioned for it. This is typically done through slut shaming or
framing their behavior as manipulative and controlling.
Water Lilies shows
Floriane as beginning to understand the patriarchal bargain and her body as
currency. Not only does she understand the value of a sexual reputation in
getting interest and attention from men, from which she can gain status, but
the way that she uses access to her body as “payment” for services rendered
(Giving Marie a kiss after she deflowers Floriane for the purpose of male
attention). Also, by framing this as a transaction, she keeps an emotional
distance from these behaviors and unfortunately does not recognize or care
about the emotional fallout of her actions; for Marie, or anyone around her. Floriane’s use of erotic
capital is the mechanism by which these misogynistic traps of
false consciousness, learned through the process of gender socialization, hurt
everyone around her, regardless of gender or sexual identity.
Uses of the Erotic and
The Lesbian Existence
Because
women have been taught to use their erotic capital and their bodies as currency
for the support of men, this strips the inherit power of the erotic that women
can use to validate themselves. According to Audre Lorde (2007) part of the
social control of women in a misogynistic patriarchal system is the suppression
and appropriation of the erotic, ignoring it as a source of information and
power in women’s lives. (p 53-54)
[Women] have been warned against [the
erotic] all [their] lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling
enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but
which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within
themselves
This is especially true when looking at the way the
patriarchal system discourages
female friendships, often framing each other as competition for male attention.
This is born out of the fragility of masculinity at the core of any
misogynistic patriarchy. Because the culture has organized the value of women
to be in the service of men, the latent fear that underlines this domination
and oppression is the lack of value and importance men have in women’s lives.
Women become instrumental to men’s lives and their livelihood (part of the
mechanism to control men too) especially in heterosexual relationships to their
benefit; men who are married with children report higher rates of happiness and
wellness. Yet, cis/het women consistently report higher
levels of health, happiness and wellness when they are unmarried and childless.
This not only shows that men and women are socialized into norms and behaviors
in opposition to their overall happiness, but it also consciously separates
women from the source of their power; each other. The alienation and
competition of women is a socially constructed mechanism of social control, because
empowered women are a danger to the patriarchal social order. Their erotic
power is a lifeforce that can be cultivated through girls and women’s
relationship to each other (Lorde 2007).
The erotic empowerment of women through their
relationships was coined by Adrianne Rich as “The lesbian Existence.” As
I explained in a previous essay:
Rich exclaims:
“The Lesbian
existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a
compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on male right of
access to women. But it is more than these, although we may first begin to
perceive it as a form of nay-saying to patriarchy, an act of resistance. It has
of course included role playing, self-hatred, breakdown, alcoholism, suicide,
and intrawoman violence; we romanticize at our peril what it means to love and
act against the grain, and under heavy penalties; and lesbian existence has
been lived (unlike, say, Jewish or Catholic existence) without access to any
knowledge of a tradition, a continuity, a social underpinning. The destruction
of records and memorabilia and letters documenting the realities of lesbian
existence must be taken very seriously as a means of keeping heterosexuality
compulsory for women, since what has been kept from our knowledge is joy,
sensuality, courage, and community, as well as guilt, self-betrayal, and pain”
As the term "lesbian" has been held to
limiting, clinical associations in its patriarchal definition, female
friendship and comradeship have been set apart from the erotic, thus limiting
the erotic itself. But as we deepen and broaden the range of what we define as
lesbian existence, as we delineate a lesbian continuum, we begin to discover
the erotic in female terms: as that which is unconfined to any single part of
the body or solely to the body itself, as an energy not only diffuse but, as Audre
Lorde (2007) has described it, omnipresent in "the sharing of joy, whether
physical, emotional, psychic," and in the sharing of work; as the
empowering joy which "makes us less willing to accept powerlessness, or
those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as
resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, and self-denial.” (p54)[2]
In Water
Lilies, it is heavily implied through genre conventions (of the
coming-of-age story tropes) that Floriane, like Marie, is trying to understand
and navigate her own sexuality; her eroticization by cis/het boys and men allowing
her to experiment. This “freedom” is afforded to her because she is a cis/het fem
presenting female. An identity whose sexuality, and its exploration, has been
co-opted and appropriated by both cis/het men and the porn industry. Because of
this, girls and women can more easily experiment with non-heterosexual
behaviors openly and in public without much sanction, as long as it is framed
as being performative for male attention. This causes many gay and bisexual
girls to go through a period of trying to pass as straight (Orenstein 2016). It
is possible that this is what Floriane is contemplating and working through in
the film, without an understanding of how her actions are affecting others
around her. It comes down to whether the audience interprets her actions
as being with calculated malicious intent, or as confusion, ignorance and oblivion
to her own charisma.
CONCLUSION
Celine
Sciamma’s debut film, Water Lilies, is the opening volley in a coming-of-age
trilogy that investigates social, gender and sexual development through an
attempted feminist lens using the female gaze. Sciamma mostly achieves this
with dialogue, genuine reactions from actors and shot compositions that try to
get inside the mind of teenage Parisian girls as they navigate the trials of
gender socialization and tribulations of their “flowering” sexual identity.
Yet, Sciamma’s later relationship with one of the film’s stars, reveals that
like the history of the male gaze in cinema, the female gaze can also be predatory.
REFERENCES
de
Beauvior, Simone 2011. The Second Sex New York: Vintage Books.
Carpenter,
Laura M. 2005. Virginity Lost An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual
Experiences. New York: New York University Press.
Lorde,
Audre 2007. Sister Outsider Essays
and Speeches by Audre Lorde Berkely: Crossing Press
Orenstein,
Peggy 2016. Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape. New
York: Harper Press
Valenti,
Jessica 2009. The Purity Myth: How
America’s Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women Berkely: Seal
Press.
