Sink or Swim

Gilles Lellouche's Sink or Swim (Le Grand Bain) opened Out of Competition at Cannes 2018 and won the César for Best Supporting Actor (Philippe Katerine). The film became one of the most commercially successful French films of its year — over 4.2 million admissions in France alone — and consolidated Lellouche, an actor and director, as a director with substantial commercial reach. The screenplay was developed with Ahmed Hamidi and Julien Lambroschini.

A group of middle-aged French men — Bertrand (Mathieu Amalric), Marcus (Benoît Poelvoorde), Laurent (Guillaume Canet, in unusually deflated mode), Simon (Jean-Hugues Anglade), and others (Philippe Katerine, Félix Moati, Alban Ivanov) — each quietly drowning in his own private crisis, sign up for an amateur men's synchronised swimming team. The team is coached by two very different women: the disciplined former competitor Delphine (Virginie Efira) and the more chaotic Amanda (Leïla Bekhti). Across what is broadly six months of training and one international competition the team works toward an unlikely goal.

The film operates as broad-comic ensemble drama — Bertrand's depression, Marcus's marital crisis, Laurent's professional slide — combined with the mature comic register that the Mathieu Amalric central performance had been honed across previous decades of French art cinema. The film became one of the warmer commercial-comedy successes in recent French cinema and a continuing reference point for the underdog-team-sport genre.