Girls Can't Swim (Widescreen)

Visually, the movie is absolutely beautiful. The acting by the two stars is superb, and the characters they play are beautifully developed - fully believable adolescents. Isild Le Besco deftly captures the desperation behind Gwen's freewheeling and promiscuous experimentations with sex, and Karen Alyx infuses Lise with an almost dangerous, introverted fire, remeniscent of Melanie Lynskey in Heavenly Creatures. Many of the supporting roles were very well-played too, especially Sandrine Blancke as Lise's older sister Vivianne and Pascal Elso as Gwen's father Alain. And unlike the vast majority of cinema I've seen, this film makes a marked distinction between sex and nudity. Yes, the girls get naked from time to time; yet, with the exception of one important scene which functions as a major turning point in the story, nearly none of the nudity is involved in the sex. The love/hate duality of the relationships among the various characters within the film is honest and believable, and the "disfunctional"-ness of the two families (and their self-destructive attempts to escape from their own lives) is well-calculated.

I can forgive all but one of the film's flaws (lack of any male characters even half as well-defined as the female ones, weak dialogue, lack of narrative coherence, etc.) on account of its strengths. But there is one I cannot forgive. At the climax of the story, a catastrophic event occurs that threatens to destroy the friendship permanently, and the film ends there. There is no aftermath, no resolution of any kind. It merely cuts off at the climax. The effect is tantamount to ending Empire Strikes Back the moment Darth Vader drops his famous bombshell about Luke Skywalker's true pedigree. All the more so because not only do you never find out what this does to the two girls and their futures, you never find out if the catastrophe that happened was purely an accident, as it seems on the surface, or if Lise had been planning it. It's one of those violations of dramatic structure that can't go by unnoticed or unobjected-to.

I'd say rent before you buy it, and judge for yourself if the powerful performances it has going for it make it worth buying despite the fact it's missing its third act.