Film

Water Lilies

Name: Water Lilies
Genre: Drama, Romance
Released: 2007
Cast: Pauline Acquart, Louise Blachère, Adèle Haenel, Warren Jacquin, Christel Baras

A 85-minute French drama about desire, belonging, and the confusing ache of adolescence. Marie, an outsider, gravitates toward the synchronized swimming team—and toward Floriane, a girl who makes her feel alive. Sciamma handles teenage sexuality with real tenderness and no neat answers. It's intimate, often wordless, shot through with summer humidity and the electric uncertainty of wanting someone you don't fully understand yet.

TMDb rating

3.3

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love quiet coming-of-age films where the feeling lives in glances, awkward silences and the sticky heat of a teenage summer rather than in plot.

Skip it if you want things to happen; this is slow, mostly observed at poolside, with long stretches where little seems to move and the tone stays deliberately unresolved.

What it asks of you: Eighty-five minutes, unhurried and watchful; it wants you to sit with pauses and read faces, and it rarely tells you what to feel.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

Blue Is the Warmest Color2013

A landmark film about sapphic love and desire told with sensory intensity. It breathes the same air as Water Lilies—the attention to how bodies move through space, how color and light become emotional language, the weight of unspoken longing.

But It's nearly three hours long and emotionally exhausting. The relationship dynamics will frustrate some viewers, and Kechiche's direction can feel relentless rather than tender.

Girlhood2014

Céline Sciamma again: a portrait of female adolescence and identity in a Paris suburb. Like Water Lilies, it's about girls on the cusp, finding power and community. Shot in a cool, observant style that trusts silence and behavior over exposition.

But It moves slowly and demands patience. The portrait of working-class life might feel unresolved to viewers craving clear narrative momentum or conventional closure.

Portrait of a Lady on Fire2019

Sciamma's masterpiece. An artist and her subject fall into a charged, tender romance during an isolated commission. Like Water Lilies, it's about desire lived in glances, gestures, and the terror of being truly seen by another person.

But It's painterly and deliberately paced. If you need plot momentum or explicit emotion, its restraint might read as cold rather than moving.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Water Lilies

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Hole2001

Both find eroticism in simplicity—in water, in gestures, in the watching itself. Tsai's aesthetic austerity and Sciamma's lyric restraint spring from the same understanding: that desire doesn't need words.

Tsai Ming-liang's experimental Taiwanese film: two neighbors living in decay discover each other through a hole in the wall. It's about desire, proximity, and the electric charge of another body across a small distance—same voltage as Water Lilies, but through a completely different aesthetic prism.

But It's formally challenging: long takes, minimal dialogue, bodies and light used like an art installation. If you need conventional narrative or conventional beauty, it will feel austere or even repellent.

Heartbeats2010

Xavier Dolan's debut: two friends fall for the same beautiful, androgynous person. It captures that ache of adolescent desire perfectly—the jealousy, the intensity, the way wanting someone can overwhelm your entire life.

But Dolan's style is very fashionable and self-conscious, which some find alienating. The emotional drama can tip into melodrama if you're not on its wavelength.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly2007

Another intimate 85-minute chamber film, also from 2007, about confinement and the mind's escape routes. Like Water Lilies, it finds profound emotion in small, precise details and the interplay of bodies and water.

But It's wordless and meditative in ways that can feel austere. Based on a true story of paralysis; emotionally heavy and not for escapist viewing.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly poster

The Summer of Sangaile2015

A quiet Lithuanian film about two girls bonding over glider planes one summer. It has Water Lilies' sense of adolescence as a suspended, charged moment—the feeling that something is about to happen but hasn't yet.

But It's slow and atmospheric to the point of abstraction. Plot is minimal, and the payoff is emotional and implicit rather than dramatic.

Tomboy2011

Also Sciamma. A child navigates gender and identity during a summer relocation, discovering the freedom and cost of reinvention. The same acute, unsentimental eye on adolescence, the same understanding of how kids actually talk.

But It's deliberately naturalistic and low-key. Some viewers find the pacing slack and the ending ambiguous rather than satisfying.

The Swimmers2022

An intimate coming-of-age about two Syrian refugee brothers bonding through competitive swimming. It carries Water Lilies' understanding of how sport becomes a portal into identity and desire, alongside survival and belonging.

But The politics can feel heavy-handed, and the film splits focus between intimate character work and larger themes. Some scenes of refugee trauma are brutal.

Mustang2015

Five sisters navigate family control and desire in rural Turkey. Like Water Lilies, it's about girls discovering their bodies and agency in spaces designed to contain them—shot with visual precision and real empathy.

But It builds toward explosive anger and desperation rather than lyrical introspection. If you prefer subtlety, its crescendo might feel operatic.

Heavenly Creatures1994

Both understand that adolescent desire isn't simple or safe. Where Sciamma watches tenderly, Jackson shows obsession devolving into madness. They're opposite poles of the same experience.

Peter Jackson's film about two teenage girls whose intense friendship spirals into obsession and tragedy. It's adolescent desire and possession told with visual imagination—a completely different register from Water Lilies but the same core: that teenage love can be all-consuming and dangerous.

But It's violent and disturbing. Based on a real murder, it doesn't flinch from depicting that intensity as destructive. If you want romance, not tragedy, this will unsettle you.

Hunger2008

Both use restraint and observation to make you feel the weight of presence. McQueen's choreography of bodies in confinement is as precise as Sciamma's poolside choreography—both asking what it means to watch someone, and be watched by them, when everything is at stake.

Steve McQueen's film about an IRA prisoner's final days—85 minutes like Water Lilies but weaponized. It's about confinement, physical suffering, and the body as protest. Two people in a room together, watching each other across an unbridgeable distance, with love and rage tangled together.

But It's austere, brutal, and about actual bodily suffering and political violence. No tenderness, no coming-of-age promise. Heavy in a way that water lilies can never be. Not for escapism.