Young Woman and the Sea Movie Review

Courtesy the Art Institute of ChicagoThe ’Star Wars’ and ‘Magpie’ actress in Joachim Ronning’s portrait of Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel.

She adored the water: ‘To me the sea is like a person. A child I’ve known a long time,’ she once told reporters. ‘I never feel lonely when I’m out there.’

This unflagging determination fueled by that comfortable feeling of being at home in the water got this young German American swimmer (portrayed here by Daisy Ridley) within steps of the English Channel record despite a storm that churned up the channel and sexist notions that female swimmers were inherently less capable. When Ederle completed it in 14 hours and 31 minutes in 1926, she not only broke a world record (held by a man), she was widely credited with changing minds about the nature of female athletes. When she returned to New York, crowds threw her a parade on a scale the city had never seen before (or since). She was cheered home as ‘the Queen of the Waves’.

As with most of her pioneering counterparts, Ederle’s cinematic biography started with barriers and animosities, many of which the director Joachim Rønning treats with the right amount of respect in Young Woman and the Sea. The slender film (written by Jeff Nathanson, based on the book of the same name by Glenn Stout) follows Ederle from childish splashes around the Coney Island pier to her momentous titanic clash with the waves of the English Channel.

Rønning, who has directed more than one Disney film (including Maleficent: Mistress of Evil and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, both also helmed by Espen Sandberg), goes full sugary at times. A heavily string-based score by Amelia Warner acts as an emotional scorekeeper, setting us up for both triumph and woe.

There are enough shots (DP Oscar Faura) of Ridley, looking across bodies of water with awe and ferocity; hair balled at her neck, shoulders rounded, ready to dive as a reflex. There is some tug in these pieces, but the greatest emotional nuance is hemmed in by Nathanson’s by-the-numbers screenplay. The careful dramatic threads and subtext of Ederle’s life then, in Young Woman and the Sea, like Netflix’s recent Nyad, get swept up in the most literal of dramaturgies.

This record-breaking swim defied the odds — and Nathanson and Rønning are efficient in take us through Trudy’s early life. We meet the swimmer in 1914, five years old, riddled with measles. She appears on her death bed and her parents (portrayed by Kim Bodnia and Jeanette Hain), afraid they are about to lose a daughter, brace themselves. Then Trudy recovers, and promptly on the eight-year-old’sreturn to health, her mother asks her father if he will teach the daughter to swim. She needs her to learn to swim, we learn the reason, because once, she tells us, a boat full of women drowned because they couldn’t swim their way out of rough waters. Because Trudy had measles, and because of the communicable nature of the disease, she was unable to swim in public pools. She learnt to swim in the Coney Island pier where she literally learnt to swim in the rougher waters.

Real action in Young Woman and the Sea doesn’t start until Gertrude (played by Rønning, who also directed) signs Trudy and her sister, Meg (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), up for competitive swim lessons the very first winter women are permitted. Rønning’s film revolves around the special part motherhood played in Trudy’s life, a longstanding narrative thread: mother and daughter are more similar than different, each cut from a determined cloth that doesn’t do no for an answer.

Trudy doesn’t give up even when Charlotte Epstein (Sian Clifford), the woman’s swim coach who goes by Eppy, won’t let her practice with the girls at first. She petitions for a chance and ends up being one of the best swimmers on the team.

Ridley’s performance as Trudy is never less than fine. She plays the character’s clumsiness and awkwardness with a degree of introversion and hesitancy that might have reminded me of the heroine of Sometimes I Think About Dying if the latter hadn’t been so busy writhing and swooning. The actress also gives an impressive performance in the water (with a lot of help from doubles), and on land.

The awards happen quickly. Trudy wins local and national competitions, and then is asked to join the US women’s Olympic swimming team in Paris. Her own visions for herself are becoming more focused. However, as Trudy thinks that she may be ready to attempt her own childhood dream and swim across the English Channel, her sister Meg retreats toward her generation’s characteristics of the time, she quits swimming, consents to marry the man she was raised to marry, and starts working at the family butchery shop.

But as much as it does, their natural rapport in person lends credence to the sibling relationship that forms the backbone of Young Woman and the Sea. Neither of them overplays it. Their characters log the most time onscreen together and they make the most of those scenes. Playing petty practical jokes on Trudy’s sour date is lovely, as is Meg helping her plan her Channel swim.

It keeps up a brisk pace, but takes a right turn for the stirring once Trudy starts her record attempt. The first attempt, to cross that choppy span, is scuttled by a snide coach (Jabez Wolffe) and the chauvinistic president of the athletic union (Glenn Fleshler). Trudy must recruit a Believer, and finds her guy in an eccentric fellow called Bill Burgess (Stephen Graham) who himself crossed the Channel in a previous version of this odyssey. Ridley seemed to me to be the expressionistálatess. Ridley on screen with Graham crackles. Their first encounter as ‘partner’ and then training buddy makes clear different levels of Trudy’s personality, and this aspect of her, the ‘balls’ that appetite needs, is evident too.

Those scenes are some of the few moments at which Young Woman and the Sea manages to be something other than a lacquered, wooden tale. The script doesn’t completely dismantle the film, not enough of them for a filmonder just how many angles a project like this could take, and how much better a version of this film could have been if the frozen feet of the screenplay didn’t encumber a person whose biggest success was her own sense of movement in the water.