Not his first foray of ruling the roost behind the camera, however, SINK OR SWIM is officially French actor Gilles Lellouche’s his first solo feature as a director, having earned 10 César Awards nominations with one win, it is a tried-and-test therapeutic underdog story, about an all-male synchronized swimming team comprised of middle-aged losers.
The usual suspects including a jobless family man Bertrand (Amalric), smitten by severe depression; Laurent (Canet), who is testy to be burdened with a son with speaking defect and a coprolalia-afflicted mother; Simon (Anglade), a rock musician who has never found the popularity he thinks he deserves; Marcus (Poelvoorde), whose business is on the verge of going to the wall and Thierry (Katerine), a natatorium custodian who fits the profile of a goofy simpleton. But, the catch is, corroborated by the treatment of the only non-white member of the team, Avanish (Thamilchelvan), whose backstory is completely overlooked (language barrier is thrown as a pat excuse), SINK OR SWIM, albeit made in 2018, isn’t woke enough to spike the privileged white male perspective with any attempt of diversity.
The same indelicacy can be gauged in terms of the treatment of female characters, the team’s two coaches are former athletes, Delphine (Efira), is a world champion slipped to an alcoholic (but why?), and Amanda (Bekhti), is paraplegic (what happened?). But these two women’s stories do not have the same import as their male counterparts, especially the latter, mostly reduced to an expletive-spouting drill sergeant grossly for comic relief. The film would have struck more emotional resonances were more ballast and attention given to the women here, like Bertrand’s wife Claire (Foïs), whose sufferance is short-changed for her unyielding support to her feckless husband, and Amalric’s deer-in-the-headlights awkwardness really makes Bertrand a difficult specimen to project our sympathy. For that matter, the most accomplished performer here is Katerine, who is totally in his element as an innocuous jester, but never stops reminding us Thierry is a sensible human being as well.
The plot unfolds smoothly, if unexceptionably, until the money shots of this ragtag national team’s performance in the international competition, one must hand it to Lellouche and his team for the collective endeavor in evoking a rousing frisson by building up a prismatic panoply of the final synchronized routines, from the bisexual lighting, the subaqueous angle to the montage splicing. If anything, the movie hits the mark as a feel-good defiance of stereotyped masculinity, ageism and athletic elitism, eventually, confraternity prevails, and it proves “a round peg will fit a square hole and vice versa”.
