Even the quietest adolescence is a kind of public conflict, a struggle between childhood and adulthood playing out for everyone to see. The two protagonists of Girls Can't Swim, an arresting first feature from French director Anne-Sophie Birot, aren't having quiet adolescences. Just out of school for the summer, 15-year-old Isild Le Besco can't go on vacation because, in a sense, she's always on vacation. The daughter of a struggling fisherman living in a seaside Brittany resort town, Le Besco spends her evenings motoring with her ostensible boyfriend (Julien Cottereau) as far as gas siphoned from the local speedboats will take them. Usually it brings them to an abandoned summer home where they make love, but when anything goes wrong Le Besco holds on to the privileges of childhood, running home to her mother's arms. Cottereau doesn't have a monopoly on Le Besco's affections, however, or her attention, much of which is directed at a best friend (Karen Alyx) who makes Le Besco's town her summer home. A cryptic phone call suggests, much to Le Besco's consternation, that Alyx won't show this summer. When Alyx turns up anyway, a secret or two in tow, the friends discover that the very things they share—a family crisis, sexual insecurity—can divide them as easily as unite them. Birot fills her film with shocking behavior, but deals primarily in another kind of shock. Like Catherine Breillat's Fat Girl, Girls Can't Swim delves headlong into the wilderness of adolescent sexuality, where only the potential for dire consequences keeps infinite possibility in check. Ever aware of how that world works, but not confined to it, Birot's perspective stretches beyond her protagonists, revealing the ways in which teen turmoil spills over into the lives of those around them, the freedom and terror upsetting the balance of long-established relationships. From the oldest character to the youngest, everyone in Girls Can't Swim is made uncomfortable by Le Besco and Alyx's fumblings toward adulthood, which turn them into puzzle pieces that no longer quite fit. "Adolesence can kill you," Birot has said in an interview. In a film that leaves the "you" intentionally vague, moment after moment she shows how.