In “The Novice”, director Lauren Hadaway rows to counter the monotony

THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT

We owe David Fincher to have exalted the cinegenic properties of rowing in a memorable passage from The Social Network (2010): bordering on abstraction, the university tournament sequence came to express the careerism, the aggressive cult of performance and competition that float above American campuses.

This is what we think of first before The Novice, by Lauren Hadaway, who has, behind her, a prolific career as a sound editor in Hollywood and has made her first feature film there. The film is entirely devoted to capturing an obsession that consumed her the day she joined the rowing club at her university. For four years, nothing existed, except to surpass oneself, pulverize one’s scores and subdue the competitors.

suffering body

His story is tied to the suffering and oozing body of his superb actress, Isabelle Fuhrman, a block of masochistic determination that gradually becomes monstrous. Lauren Hadaway is trying something commendable here: never to venture on the side of her heroine’s psychology, above all not to explain anything, to give free rein to a kind of muscular poetry, a quest that runs on empty. With each new training, the young Alex Dall hovers, vanishes voluptuously in the surpassing of oneself.

But the film struggles to counter the monotony that awaits it, despite the will never to film the physical effort twice in the same way. At the risk of transforming any performance into a music video. The Novice finally sins by a “good student” side that seeks to avoid any lack of taste and any misconduct – a posture that plays against the fury that he claims to document.