Young Woman and the Sea (2024) * * *

 

Directed by:  Joachim Ronning

Starring:  Daisy Ridley, Stephen Graham, Lilly Aspell, Glen Fleshler, Christopher Eccleston, Sian Clifford, Kim Bodnia, Jeanette Hain, Tilda Cobham-Hervey

I can imagine people want to swim the English Channel for the same reasons they want to climb Mount Everest...because it's there.  In 1926, Trudy Ederle (Ridley) became the first woman to successfully swim the grueling, freezing, dangerous, maybe even suicidal 21-mile stretch from France to Dover, England. Young Woman and the Sea is the depiction of Ederle's journey from nearly dying from measles as a teenager to becoming the world's greatest swimmer. 

Trudy is a quiet woman with obviously steely determination and grit.  You have to be in order to even attempt to swim the English Channel.  Like with many movies based on a true story, you have to fact check afterward.  It's standard.  I won't go over the minutiae of combing through details because they won't matter anyway.  What Young Woman and the Sea captures is the life-threatening swim which only two people in the world had completed at that time, and the toll it takes on the swimmer and the team which only follow her so far until she has to manage the last five miles of shallows in the dark with increasingly cold water.

Even if the swimmer makes it to land, there is no guarantee he or she won't die from cumulative trauma later.  Oh, and then there is section of the channel where jellyfish gather and sting the hell about of the unfortunate soul who swims through there.  Ederle was taught to swim along with her sister Meg after a New York ferry sank and almost everyone on board died.   Trudy at first learned awkwardly, but soon excelled enough to win races and set world records.  According to the movie, Trudy's 1924 Paris Olympics performance was subpar with one bronze and other races in which she doesn't medal.  Well, she actually won a gold and two bronze medals, but this storyline fuels her desire to swim the channel.

Her "coach" in the Olympics (who instead kept the female swimmers locked away on the boat over) and assigned to her for the channel swim is former swimmer Jabez Wolffe (Eccleston), who tried 21 times to swim the channel unsuccessfully and resents Trudy.  He works to sabotage her during the swim and succeeds in doing so.  Young Woman and the Sea focuses heavily on the idea of Trudy facing a patriarchal backlash to her efforts and the double standard in which Trudy's bathing suit is scrutinized while swimmer Bill Burgess (Graham), who swam the channel, practically wears a thong while doing so. 

The movie works because of Ridley's quiet power and intensity.  We root for her, not because the evil men want her to fail, but because swimming the English Channel is exhausting to watch, let alone perform.  On that level, Young Woman and the Sea is a success at capturing the swim's grind.