A debut effort by director Celine Sciamma, Water Lilies (Naissance des Pieuvres) is an impressive little film about the hell that is the slow and confused process of sexual discovery.
Set against the background of a synchronized swimming program for schoolchildren, the film opens to scenes of writhing bodies and the bright, grease painted and utterly artificial smiles that seem to be the peculiar motif of this bizarre sport.
Beneath the paint and the smiles are the girls who are about to become women, inhabiting a locker-room world as harsh as, and certainly more poisonous than, the male equivalent. This is not a French version of Mean Girls, and Pauline Acquart (as Marie) is vastly more interesting to watch than Lindsay Lohan, as she struggles to come to terms with a crush on synchronized swim team captain Floriane and her friendship with the sexually precocious but tubby Anne.
Marie, who at 15 still inhabits the body of a child, is entranced by the physicality of Floriane, who already has the body of a woman, and is learning to manipulate the weapons of her sexuality. Floriane knows the power of her body over both men and women and uses it mercilessly to get what she wants, developing a cruel hold over Marie that forms the core of the picture. Marie, thoughtful and sensitive, is looking for love, and makes herself a willing victim.
Anne, eager for sexual experience, finds herself betrayed by her own lusts and looks for solace in her friendship with Marie. They are nibbling at the edges of adult sexual relationships and every tentative step requires a merciless determination that is likely to wound both themselves and their closest friends. And in the pool, the girls dance, their perfectly poised bodies held up by the violent agitation of their limbs beneath the surface.
Marie, Floriane and Anne seem to inhabit a world without adults and are left to sort out their own problems in the insulated environment of the locker room and the occasional house party. But it is the very narrowness of this focus that provides the appeal of Sciamma’s film, as it allows many small and telling details of the emotional maelstrom that is adolescent sexuality to be shown, unobstructed by the distractions of a wider social milieu.
There is a strong lesbian undercurrent in Water Lilies, but the film manages to reach beyond this narrow category and is a contemplative exploration of adolescence, cramming many thoughtful observations into its 85 minutes. The story does not arrive at any particular conclusions, but as with sexual discovery, it is the process that is most interesting.
May 26 to June 1 When the Qing Dynasty first took control over many parts of Taiwan in 1684, it roughly continued the Kingdom of Tungning’s administrative borders (see below), setting up one prefecture and three counties. The actual area of control covered today’s Chiayi, Tainan and Kaohsiung. The administrative center was in Taiwan Prefecture, in today’s Tainan. But as Han settlement expanded and due to rebellions and other international incidents, the administrative units became more complex. By the time Taiwan became a province of the Qing in 1887, there were three prefectures, eleven counties, three subprefectures and one directly-administered prefecture, with
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) and the New Taipei City Government in May last year agreed to allow the activation of a spent fuel storage facility for the Jinshan Nuclear Power Plant in Shihmen District (石門). The deal ended eleven years of legal wrangling. According to the Taipower announcement, the city government engaged in repeated delays, failing to approve water and soil conservation plans. Taipower said at the time that plans for another dry storage facility for the Guosheng Nuclear Power Plant in New Taipei City’s Wanli District (萬里) remained stuck in legal limbo. Later that year an agreement was reached
What does the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in the Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) era stand for? What sets it apart from their allies, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)? With some shifts in tone and emphasis, the KMT’s stances have not changed significantly since the late 2000s and the era of former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) current platform formed in the mid-2010s under the guidance of Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), and current President William Lai (賴清德) campaigned on continuity. Though their ideological stances may be a bit stale, they have the advantage of being broadly understood by the voters.
In a high-rise office building in Taipei’s government district, the primary agency for maintaining links to Thailand’s 108 Yunnan villages — which are home to a population of around 200,000 descendants of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) armies stranded in Thailand following the Chinese Civil War — is the Overseas Community Affairs Council (OCAC). Established in China in 1926, the OCAC was born of a mandate to support Chinese education, culture and economic development in far flung Chinese diaspora communities, which, especially in southeast Asia, had underwritten the military insurgencies against the Qing Dynasty that led to the founding of
RSS