It's important to tell you that I am a former synchronized swimmer. I competed for 15 years. It was my life. Water Lilies, the ambitious first film from 27-year-old French director Céline Sciamma, is about synchronized swimming. It is also the first film ever to use synchronized swimming intelligently, as the powerful metaphor that it is, representing the fascism and subterranean maneuvering of female adolescence. Above water, or walking down the hallways of high schools, we have only one goal as girls newly confronted with the real possibility of sex: look good, and make it look easy. Underwater we're working like hell.

Sciamma makes clear from the very first scene that she plans to go beneath the dividing line of the water's surface. The underwater camera is a warning: Parts of this movie are going to be fascinatingly ugly, all gangly and half-formed. In that first scene, the rather physically underdeveloped Marie (Pauline Acquart) gazes desirously at the swimmers from her spot on the bleachers. You think she wants to become them; you worry she's going to join the team. The plot lets you believe this for a few minutes, until you discover she's actually lusting after the team captain, Floriane (Adele Haenel). Meanwhile, Marie's unpopular (and bad-at-synchro) friend Anne (Louise Blachère) develops a crush—the crush begins in a masochistic, self-exposing way—on Floriane's boyfriend, who is getting pretty impatient for sex.

These characters want each other, and they aren't old enough to be kind about it. What transpires is a jolt of cruelty that travels like electricity. It powers the strangest of acts, and only a few of them feel unlikely. (Burying a bra in the dirt?) There is blood.