Desire and Queer Adolescence: Céline Sciamma's Naissance des Pieuvres

• Published in: Journal of popular culture 2017-10, Vol.50 (5), p.1127-1142
• Main Author: Jonet, M. Catherine
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 21st century; Adolescence; Adolescent girls; Adolescents; Artistic representation (Imitation); Cinematography; Coming-of-age films; Conventions; French culture; LGBTQ studies; Motion picture criticism; Motion pictures; Narratives; Sciamma, Celine; Teenagers; Viewers; Water
• ISSN: 0022-3840; 1540-5931
• DOI: 10.1111/jpcu.12596

The final sounds and images of Celine Sciamma's 2007 French film "Naissance des Pieuvres" ("Water Lilies") illustrate the film's sustained examination of surface and depth. What the viewer sees and what is hinted at in the depths concealed beneath the water or what exists beneath the overlay of the soundtrack are not the same. Unlike the disjunctive filmic technique that Roger F. Cook describes in his examination of David Lynch's "Muholland Drive," Sciamma's film does not demand "repeatedly that the viewer should take a ... second, closer look" to make sense of the film. Instead, she creates protracted, static shots and prolonged cinematic moments that compel the viewer to perceive beyond external appearances. The viewer is invited to take long, lingering glimpses and think over the adolescent characters' actions and choices as well as the filmic elements of the narrative process. Sciamma's film focuses on the lives of three teenage girls and their experiences of adolescence one summer in Paris. The film's use of surface and undersurface offers a prolonged, sustained space of betweeness for Marie and Floriane, as well as for viewers, that enables narrative possibilities for queer adolescents beyond expected conventions of coming‐of‐age.