Nuisance des Pieuvres captures the emotional tempests of early teen years that we — the grown up us — likely cannot remember and will thus dismiss with a laugh. The movie brings those turbulent years back to us. If the plot’s movement, the film’s cuts and its music feel abrupt at times, one must realize they also serve to underscore the intensity and transitory nature of those years. Sciamma is well aware that what the girls are experiencing is specific to early teen years (i.e. that temporality). When those years pass, the emotions and even the experience itself will vanish and barely leave a trace on our development. What the girls experience at the end of the film, floating in the middle of the pool, seems to be a sensation of total Void and Darkness. That sensation, however, will also vanish.
What is the significance of those years then? Our bodies are undergoing momentous changes, so everything we do and experience seem to be the result of our sexual awakening. Those years are years of heightened bodily awareness. (Anne depicts this sensual-relation-to-one’s-own-body perfectly.) Our attachments during those years all seem to have more to do with our own needs and developments (often sexual) than with what Marie and Anne call “love.” (Love is something that you do, not something that you feel. It is something in response to feelings that another person has for you, and is mutually reinforcing in that way. Thus, Love, by definition, is two-way and precludes the intense-solo-fantasizing-about-another-person that we all do.) One needs to only look at the sex scenes. The characters are hardly having sex with each other. When Marie penetrates Floriane, her own sexuality awakens in the place of Floriane’s lost virginity. Floriane weeps for her lost virginity, or rather, her sense of being alienated from everyone else (solipsism and the need to seduce are intimately related). François sleeps with Anne to explore his sexuality, and, as seen from his aggressiveness, has probably already subscribed to the myth of uncontrollable male sexual urge. Anne obliges because she feels the need to have sex. The mistaking-fantasizing-as-love phenomenon also explains why Marie is capable of acting as both friend and lover to Floriane.
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