IN THE frenzy of film festivals, as reviewers seek out new talent to write home about, it often happens that movies are given more credit than they are due. Such was the case last year when Water Liliesscreened in a sidebar section at Cannes and its 27-year-old debutante writer- director, Céline Sciamma, was garlanded with critical laurels.

Water Liliesis set in a blandly anonymous town in the Paris suburbs. Here skinny, shy Marie (Pauline Acquart) abandons her best friend Anne (Louise Blachère), who is self-conscious about her weight, in favour of their school's synchronised swimming star Floriane (Adèle Haenel), who is beautiful and self-assured. While Floriane is dating the male swim team's stud (Warren Jacquin), Anne offers herself to him, too, and Marie appears to have developed a schoolgirl crush on Floriane.

As countless movies have observed, it's tough to be a teen coping with all that post-pubescent confusion and angst in the transition years between childhood and adulthood. Water Liliesis at its most acute in catching the casual cruelty and unthinking fickleness of these young people. Their self- absorption is emphasised in the movie's exclusion of adults to the periphery. And not a lot happens in Sciamma's slender scenario, which stretches credibility in certain narrative contrivances.

The director certainly succeeds in eliciting convincing performances from the inexperienced actresses playing the three teens at the centre of her languorous movie. In charting the nascent sexual longings of these emotionally immature characters, Sciamma treats their behaviour with a candour that would be unthinkable in a mainstream American movie, although she demonstrates rather more restraint than French director Catherine Breillat in her provocative films such as À Ma Soeur.