Directed by former competitive swimmer Pascal Plante and featuring a two-time Olympic athlete in the title role, “Nadia, Butterfly” qualifies as both a sports movie and not-a-sports movie — which is to say, Plante’s aloof, intermittently engaging second feature takes a backstage look at a defining moment in a swimmer’s career, but it does so in a way that violates nearly all the rules of the game.
For starters, the film opens with the final race of Canadian swimmer Nadia Beaudry (Katerine Savard), at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, rather than building up to the big event and hitching drama on the question of whether she wins or loses. The genre has trained audiences to watch sports movies the way they do the events themselves, driven by the suspense of the outcome. Here, we know relatively early on that Nadia will go home with a medal, but not the best one,...
For starters, the film opens with the final race of Canadian swimmer Nadia Beaudry (Katerine Savard), at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, rather than building up to the big event and hitching drama on the question of whether she wins or loses. The genre has trained audiences to watch sports movies the way they do the events themselves, driven by the suspense of the outcome. Here, we know relatively early on that Nadia will go home with a medal, but not the best one,...
- 8/5/2020
- by Peter Debruge
- Variety Film + TV
About halfway through Pascal Plante’s film “Nadia, Butterfly,” a young swimmer goes to a party in the Olympic village, decides that she needs to put on some music and selects the Italian national anthem in honor of her hosts, the Italian crew team. But when they ask her to play “O, Canada” in return, she demurs and finds a different anthem: Canadian singer Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated,” which has her singing lustily to the chorus line, “Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?”
It’s an appropriate theme song for the undeniably complicated Nadia, an Olympic swimmer who is retiring in her early 20s but is uncomfortable with the very idea of a life after athletics. But the movie itself doesn’t make her, or her story, any more complicated than it has to be – it’s a restrained and intimate character study that also...
It’s an appropriate theme song for the undeniably complicated Nadia, an Olympic swimmer who is retiring in her early 20s but is uncomfortable with the very idea of a life after athletics. But the movie itself doesn’t make her, or her story, any more complicated than it has to be – it’s a restrained and intimate character study that also...
- 7/29/2020
- by Steve Pond
- The Wrap
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