In the mid-twenties, American swimmer Gertrude Ederle (Daisy Ridley) plans to become the first woman to cross the English Channel.
What a great first scene. Whatever my feelings about the movie, Young Woman and the Sea starts strong.
We open with Trudy (Daisy Ridley), face and body smeared with fat, muttering a song as she faces the roar of the channel.
The camera is almost comfortably close, with the roar of the sea dominating the soundtrack.
Cut to her back and the roiling waters of the English Channel stretch out under grey skies.
This was the second time I watched Young Woman and the Sea. I did not care for it the first time.
After The Boys in the Boat, I wanted to check the film out again. And not just because they both feature the song ‘Ain't We Got Fun’ to an annoying degree.
They make for an interesting pair - both sports movies based on true stories, and set about a decade apart.
They both take place in times of personal and broader socio-economic struggles.
And, most frustratingly, to varying degrees they both fail to make those struggles feel concrete - their impact on the characters is cosmetic and aesthetic, not internal.
Young Woman and the Sea knows what it wants to be about. And it states it bluntly and inelegantly, as our heroine listens to her mother (Jeanette Hain) explain why so many women died in a recent boat fire (they did not know how to swim).
It sets the movie off on the wrong foot.
I can accept a certain level of bluntness but this introduction of swimming and gender is so dull and uncinematic, it feels like a parody of bad biopics.
The big issue with the first part of the movie is that it is too long. And the reason it feels so long is because it wants to draw on the entirety of Trudy’s life story before her epic swim.
Like too many biopics, the movie covers too much ground. And what makes it worse is that, for most of the first half of the movie, Trudy is not the driving force of the story. The early moves are pushed by other characters, namely her mother and sister, and she is moved from key event to event by these characters’ choices.
The film wants to present Trudy as someone who did not take charge until she had to, but that is not how it is presented. It just feels like a series of scenes showing Trudy’s early life in chronological order, with little sense of dramatic escalation.
Daisy Ridley is a game lead but the character is strangely muted - and her lack of agency is highlighted further by having other characters making choices for her, or, most dispiritingly, declaring what she is feeling.
I felt like the film gave more inner life to her parents (Kim Bodnia and Hain) and sister (Tilda Cobham-Hervey).
The movie picks up post-Olympics - her medals are packed, no more women swimming at the Olympics; her sister is marrying. Trudy is back where she started, at home with her parents, but now she has her own motivation to leave.
Frankly the movie should have started here. It feels like at this point is where Trudy has motivation, and the movie gains some drive when she finally makes the deal to swim to New Jersey - I wish there was more tension to the scene, but the film does feel like it is moving.
Once the film finally reaches the French coast, and Trudy begins planning for her swim , it is the first time where there are clear stakes and obstacles.
I spent the last sequence wishing the film had been more focused around the swim.
It might have been less commercial, four-quadrant but it is the one chunk of the movie where it gets really engaging.
I wanted this movie to be more visceral - it really hit home when the movie ends on footage of the real Trudy. The roughness of early film stock cut through the film’s overly-polished aesthetic, and was better at conveying the enormity of what Trudy achieved.
A great story forced into an overly familiar narrative structure, Young Woman and the Sea could have benefited from a more streamlined, and tactile approach to its subject.
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