Young Woman and the Sea
In “Young Woman and the Sea,” Daisy Ridley fights jellyfish as well as the patriarchy with equal bravery.
The actress plays Trudy Ederle, who was the first woman to swim across the English Channel in this gripping biographical drama. In 1926 nearly a century before last year’s Oscar nominated open water swimming triumph “Nyad” which it’s hard not to compare it to and that’s because sports nutrition has come a long way since then. Nobody was dropping nets of tea and fried chicken down for Diana Nyad on her arduous 100-mile journey from Cuba to Florida.
That’s one of the most interesting (and infuriating) things about director Joachim Ronning’s film based on sportswriter Glenn Stout’s book of the same name: The men in charge of this sport don’t just not know what Ederle (and other female athletes) need in order to train, compete and thrive they also don’t care. And mostly, they’re openly hostile even to Olympians. But we’re resourceful creatures, women are, and Ederle always finds a way. She stays afloat with her quick wit and strong sense of self when others underestimate her, that same fierce spark we saw in Ridley as Rey throughout the last three “Star Wars” movies is here too.
“Young Woman and the Sea” is definitely a movie worth seeing for young women who play sports, though not exclusively so. Anyone who has ever gone after something will recognize its themes of daring and persistence. Rønning strikes a nice balance here, making a feel good sports movie that’s stirring without being schmaltzy, one that dips into genre tropes just enough to provide familiarity and structure.
It’s also an adventure story through and through. The Norwegian filmmaker whose 2012 Oscar nominee “Kon-Tiki” probably prepared him for the water heavy shoot makes us feel like we’re cutting through the waves right alongside Ederle. Her passage through a field of brilliantly red jellyfish is especially terrifying, and so too is the depth of her fear, even in darkness, when she’s forced to go it alone in the shallows off Dover. Cinematographer Oscar Faura (“The Impossible,” “The Imitation Game”) vividly captures a range of settings, from Ederle’s cramped, working class upbringing to the sun dappled vastness of the English Channel.
But we see Ederle first as a sickly child in 1914 Manhattan on the verge of succumbing to measles. Adorable Olive Abercrombie plays her as a spunky tween who overcomes this physical setback to take up swimming though that’s just not done by girls, according to her traditional German immigrant father (Kim Bodnia), who repeatedly scolds her. Ridley takes over as a teenager, with Tilda Cobham Hervey (Helen Reddy in the biopic “I Am Woman”) playing Trudy’s older sister Meg. (They’re well cast as siblings and share an easy warmth with each other but both actresses look too old to be playing characters so much younger which is distracting for a while.) Their elegant and headstrong mother (Jeanette Hain) insists that both daughters should be swimmers, which leads to obligatory training montages in a tiny indoor pool led by the amusingly no-nonsense Lottie Epstein (Sian Clifford).
Veteran screenwriter Jeff Nathanson (“Catch Me If You Can,” “The Terminal”)’s script poignantly balances Trudy’s home life and athletic ambitions the friction between what’s expected of her as a butcher’s daughter and what she wants for herself
She is fully aware of the path that has been set for her an arranged marriage to a nice German boy, a neighborhood she will likely never leave and she rejects all of it. The way she handles herself at a hotel bar in a French coastal town that serves as the base of her 21-mile swim implies that she’ll be fine before she even gets in the water. Among the hard drinking locals, Stephen Graham and Alexander Karim are standout as competitors who recognize their own crazy drive in her and become unlikely allies.
But this is a journey as destination movie, quite literally. The low-tech method of tracking her progress across the English Channel at first supplies laughs, then great tension. The ebullient sense of joy on the other hand is crowd pleasing without being corny. “Young Woman and Sea” does not reinvent the wheel in any fashion but it keeps us engaged for every laborious stroke.
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