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Critics Consensus: The well-acted Girls Can't Swim is a sensitive depiction of two girls' coming-of-age.
Critic Consensus: The well-acted Girls Can't Swim is a sensitive depiction of two girls' coming-of-age.
All Critics (34) | Top Critics (16) | Fresh (24) | Rotten (10)
The film's intimate camera work and searing performances pull us deep into the girls' confusion and pain as they struggle tragically to comprehend the chasm of knowledge that's opened between them.
Birot has succeeded in making a movie that has some laughs, low points and high ideals.
Until its final minutes this is a perceptive study of two families in crisis -- and of two girls whose friendship is severely tested by bad luck and their own immaturity.
I felt sad for Lise not so much because of what happens as because she was captured by this movie when she obviously belongs in something lighter and sunnier, by Rohmer, for example.
Despite its shortcomings, Girls Can't Swim represents an engaging and intimate first feature by a talented director to watch, and it's a worthy entry in the French coming-of-age genre.
Compelling, beautifully photographed French import.
An overly melodramatic but somewhat insightful French coming-of-age film ...
The heedless impetuousness of youth is on full, irritating display in [this] meandering and pointless French coming-of-age import from writer-director Anne-Sophie Birot.
...a well-observed and disturbing little movie
The story ultimately takes hold and grips hard.
For a long time the film succeeds with its dark, delicate treatment of these characters and its unerring respect for them.
Feels less like it's about teenagers, than it was written by teenagers.
Two best friends that have been separated look forward to spending the summer together. All's not as well as it first appears though. Gwen is a confused girl who uses her sexuality to embrace some sort of acceptance missing from her mother and father. Lise is emotionally repressed, even being told not to cry after her father's death. It's a film that captures those awkward moments of youth, friends one minute and then arguing the next, but never really explores them. The film keeps the audience interested with the different twists and turns but mostly it is how each character deals with situations that become the most exciting part. Gwen's father is the most conflicted of all characters as he drunkenly tries to do what is right for his family and get in his estranged wifes good books once again. At the same time he is also trying to be a strict father to a promiscuous daughter and a father figure to a girl who has lost her own. Not everybody, but certainly for those who like slightly dark and awkward cinema.
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