Céline Sciamma's La Naissance des pieuvres (2007): Seduction and be-coming

Abstract

ABSTRACTAdolescent girls in cinema have always been of interest to film directors, both men and women alike. The young girl has been a subject of predilection due to her ambiguous position, as no longer a child but not yet an adult. Over the years, film-makers have looked at this transitional state as a process of development, as the young girl evolves in the constricted familial and social spheres. In doing so, the cinema has worked as a reinforcement of the type of image of adolescent girls projected by dominant social discourses. As early as the 1970s, Catherine Breillat attacked conventional depictions of young girls and introduced a new type of coming-of-age film with Une vraie jeune fille/A Real Young Girl (1976), which explores issues of both socialization and self-exploration, further developed in her later works, 36 fillette/Virgin (1987) and A ma sœur/Fat Girl (2001). I will argue that in the early 2000s, this representation (based on the young girl's inner self) intensified, by addressing the example of Céline Sciamma's La Naissance des pieuvres/Water Lilies (2007), among others. In Sciamma's groundbreaking first film, parents and schools are absent, leaving the adolescent girls to evolve in the public but fluid (in the Irigarayan sense) sphere of the swimming pool. I propose to examine the connection between the image of the adolescent girl and the enclosed but personal and complex environment of the swimming pool to contend that Sciamma provides a new focus on adolescent girls' (self-)be-coming or birth (as suggested by the film's title).