Sink or Swim

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

A group of middle-aged French men, each drowning in a private crisis of his own, sign up for an amateur men's synchronised swimming team: Bertrand (Mathieu Amalric), Marcus (Benoît Poelvoorde), Laurent (Guillaume Canet, unusually deflated), Simon (Jean-Hugues Anglade) and others (Philippe Katerine, Félix Moati, Alban Ivanov). Two very different women coach them, the disciplined former competitor Delphine (Virginie Efira) and the more chaotic Amanda (Leïla Bekhti). Over roughly six months of training, building up to one international competition, the team works toward a goal nobody would have bet on.

It plays as a broad-comic ensemble drama, with each man carrying his own trouble (Bertrand's depression, Marcus's marital crisis, Laurent's professional slide), and it is anchored by the mature comic register Amalric had honed over decades of French art cinema. It became one of the warmest commercial comedy successes of recent French cinema, and it remains a reference point for the underdog team-sport film.