IN THE SWIM OF THINGS
LUMINOUS DRAMA GOES BEHIND THE SCENES OF OLYMPIC AQUATICS
Nadia, Butterfly
Cast: Katerine Savard,
Ariana Mainville Director: Pascal Plante
Duration: 1 h 47 m
Swimming is the underdog of the sports movie genre. Look up best- of lists and you’ll find stories about boxing, basketball, wrestling, baseball, surfing, running, golf, tennis and even horse and auto racing before a single swimmer’s tale.
All of which makes the luminous Quebec drama Nadia, Butterfly both a rare movie about the event and a come-from-behind victory in filmmaking. It’s also technically a science- fiction movie, since it’s set in a future that never happened – the Tokyo Olympics in the summer of 2020.
Katerine Savard stars as Nadia Beaudr y, a French- Canadian swimmer, her performance given a wistful tinge by the fact that she’s planning to retire from the sport at the end of the Games. The film takes its title from the butterfly stroke that is Nadia’s specialty, but also from the fact that she’s about to emerge into a different, post- sports life. The uncertainty and anxiety of that change drives the story forward.
Writer/director ( and former competitive swimmer!) Pascal Plante has a keen eye for what goes on behind the scenes in the world of aquatic sports. His long takes capture blood tests, ice baths, massage therapy and, in one thrilling sequence, the relay event in which Nadia and three teammates win bronze for Canada.
This seems as good a time as any to mention that Savard and her co- stars are all first-time actors from the world of swimming, with Savard essentially re- enacting her bronze win in Rio in 2016. Sandrine Mainville, as her best friend Marie-pierre, also picked up a bronze medal at those Games.
It makes sense from a physical point of view — most full- time actors don’t have the kind of deltoids as these women. But any concern that Plante chose his cast for their swimming prowess alone is undone by their naturalistic performances. Introverted and moody, Nadia briefly upsets her teammates with a rant about how self- centred swimmers are, before deciding to head out for a night on the town with Marie-pierre.
Both women hook up with fellow athletes — MariePierre fancies an Italian rower, while Nadia allows herself to be chatted up by a Lebanese fencer who’s fluent in Arabic, French and English. Most of the film is in French with subtitles, although English sometimes becomes the common language, as often happens in international gatherings.
They start in a noisy Tokyo bar before heading to an after- party, where a request for “Canadian music” leads to them belting out Avril Lavigne’s Complicated, drunkenly off-key.
Hung over the next morning, they struggle to make it through their media appearances and coaching meets, done in by the kind of youthful misbehaviour that seldom makes the news but doubtless happens off- camera at the Olympics. Teammates Karen and Jess, one married and the other too young to drink legally, bow out of the evening’s debauchery and are notably fresher- faced as the face the media.
There’s a melancholy undertow in Nadia, Butterfly that Savard’s quiet performance captures perfectly. Part of the huge media machine that is the world of amateur athletics, she’s nonetheless taken aback when her fellow Canadians show her she’s made a list of “hottest athletes of Tokyo 2020.”
And while she may have travelled the world, she points out to Marie- Pierre that she’s never so much as booked a flight or hotel room. She goes where she’s told, mostly, and when we see her walking the streets of Tokyo alone, wandering into a video arcade to try a claw game she looks frail, almost lost.
Nadia, Butterfly doesn’t feature any fireworks beyond the literal kind that mark those Games that never actually took place. But it doesn’t need to. The introspection and contemplative mood are all that is required to pull the viewer into this woman’s world.
Nadia, Butterfly opens Sept. 18 in Toronto and across the province of Quebec, with other cities to follow. Π•••