Nadia, Butterfly

 

One of the things I’m trying to work on as a filmmaker is broadening my film palette by watching different kinds of films. Even though I do think I have cast a pretty wide net of films to talk about on this blog, I still believe there’s more out there to be discussed than just mainstream or one-level-below-mainstream stuff. This is why I am giving a one-week trial on MUBI, to widen my palette of films. And let me tell you, If all the films on MUBI are as good as Pascal Plante’s Nadia, Butterfly, then I may just have to become a full subscriber because this was an amazing film!  

 

Quite simply, the film tells the story of a French-Canadian Olympic swimmer named Nadia (played by real-life Olympic swimmer Katerine Savard) who’s planning to retire after her final swim meet in the Summer 2020 Olympics (…yeah, as you can tell, this was shot in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic. As a matter of fact, this film was supposed to screen at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival before…all that happened). Anyway, the whole film is about Nadia struggling with how she’s going to redefine herself now that she’s given up basically who she was up to this point.

 

And it is this theme that defines the whole film’s aesthetic decisions. Cinematographer Stephanie Weber Biron’s cinematography helps to demonstrate the conflicting emotions Nadia is feeling via a mostly handheld style, plus multiple long take scenes and a desaturated color palette. Another interesting note about the look of the film is the usage of blue, not just in the water of the Olympic pool, but also in the nightclubs that Nadia and her friends frequent after their swim meet. The musical score also aids in this feeling of confusion, opting for an electronic, textural style that brings to mind the music of Johann Johannson or Atticus Ross.

 

Savard’s central performance as Nadia is not only impressive – given that she’s not a professional actor – but also very relatable on a personal level. As an artist who’s not quite struggling but still hasn’t quite made it, I often think about having to redefine myself as a person if my music or film doesn’t work out. And even though Nadia came to her decision more by choice than by experiencing failure, the question of “who am I outside of what I do?” is something that everyone can relate to, especially those of us in the arts who sometimes put too much of ourselves into our passion, sometimes at the expense of important life experiences – a theme which the film explores deftly in an especially funny and moving scene where Nadia and her best friend Marie (Ariane Mainville) frequent a Tokyo afterparty and both drunkenly sing Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated”. This is the first time in the film we’ve ever seen Nadia have any real fun outside of swimming, and it’s completely engrossing. Never did I think that two drunk women badly singing a song would emotionally move me, but here we are.

 

So, definitely check this one out on MUBI, folks! You won’t regret it!