<i>Young Woman and the Sea</i> (2024)

In August 1926, Gertrude Ederle became the fastest swimmer and the first woman to swim the English Channel. Only five men had ever swum this tricky passage, and twenty-year-old Ederle beat their fastest time by about two hours. Thanks to a well-orchestrated media campaign leading up to her swim, she was greeted in England by excited crowds. On her return to New York City, over two million people attended her ticker-tape parade. Ederle's achievement and the attendant publicity succeeded in changing the public's attitude to women's sports in general, putting to rest Victorian views that women's bodies were biologically unsuited to physical (or mental) exertion. Joachim Rønning's new Walt Disney Pictures film Young Woman and the Sea (2024) follows Ederle's life from her childhood to that ticker-tape parade. The film is strongly committed to showing the obstacles women faced at that time, and how Ederle's swim made a difference to many other women.Young Woman and the Sea is based mainly on the sportswriter Glenn Stout's 2009 biography of the same name, but the film's feminism improves considerably on the book. Stout frequently described women's bodies in sexualized terms: the Australian swimmer Annette Kellermann's “curvaceous figure” appears several times, making her “the world's first sex symbol,” while Ederle's coach Charlotte Epstein has “mouse-colored hair” and a “slight figure.” The film refuses to sexualize the girls’ bodies, allowing them to be the athletes they were, and instead emphasizes their struggles with societal restrictions: the disadvantages of the clumsy swimsuits women had to wear, the difficulty women had in gaining access to swimming pools, and the doubts and discouragement they faced from the men who sponsored and coached them. As societal interest in Ederle's quest to swim the Channel slowly increased from 1924 to 1926, we see the public slowly changing their minds about women's sports, and women's participation in competitive activities. The film culminates in triumph and celebration.Alongside this feminist theme, the filmmakers show us Ederle's pure delight in being in the ocean. A surprising amount of the film shows us Ederle (Daisy Ridley) swimming from her own point of view, underwater, with waves and fish shifting around her. One particularly astonishing sequence shows Ederle swimming through a large school of jellyfish. The silence and isolation are palpable, but also the excitement and joy she felt. One of Ederle's advantages in her swim was that she was more accustomed than other swimmers—men or women—to spending several hours at a time simply swimming around the ocean for her own pleasure, and we get a strong sense of that here.Ederle spent so much time alone in the water partly because her deafness from childhood measles made social conversation difficult. The teenage Ederle, who feared exclusion, concealed her deafness as well as she could, but the film appropriately acknowledges Ederle's deafness. Even in scenes where her deafness is not the point, the other characters accommodate her impairment, turning to face her before speaking, speaking loudly and clearly, and using chalk on blackboards when she is swimming. Even better, we see how Ederle's deafness, by leading her to spend a great deal of time swimming, was a core cause of her success. The inclusion of other disabilities among minor characters would have helped to normalize impairments. But the film's approach does good work including Ederle's impairment without centering it.In pursuit of these laudable goals, however, the film makes a few questionable choices. By telling Ederle's story as a standard story of immigrants working hard and making good, it conceals that her father was very well off. He and his brothers owned a wholesale sausage business and New York real estate, and Ederle learned to swim at the second home he owned in an upscale German American beach community. Henry Ederle had no difficulty paying for his children's lessons, and he made no objection except in the interest of preserving Ederle's hearing. As is still true, children without family money had real difficulty accessing sports facilities, but that was not Ederle's issue.More importantly, as so often happens with accounts of early twentieth-century feminism, the film ignores the ways in which first-wave feminism came at the expense of Black Americans. This was even more true in swimming than it was in other areas, so we might have been shown that Black people were not welcome on white beaches, or on the swim team Ederle joined. I saw no people of color at all in the film's New York City as Ederle was growing up, while the film's narrative included only the German immigrant Johnny Weissmuller's three gold medals in swimming in 1924, ignoring the world records set, and gold medals won, by the Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku in 1912 and 1920, and the silver he won in 1924. The film's only principal Black actor, the Ugandan immigrant Alexander Karim, plays an Egyptian swimmer, Ishaq Helmi, here inexplicably renamed “Benji.” Although Helmi was independently wealthy and succeeded in swimming the Channel in 1928—the first Egyptian to do so—the film portrays him mainly as Ederle's assistant and supporter. Even his support role is underplayed: Helmi rode in the tugboat that accompanied Ederle on her famous swim and swam with her part of the way, but the film leaves his stand-in Benji behind on the beach.Helmi's inclusion at this crucial point in the film would have brought some needed racial balance, but the decision to exclude him probably derived as much from feminism as racism. Here the film again improves on Stout's book, which claims improbably that Ederle was “no feminist swimming for a cause.” The film version of Young Woman and the Sea shows that feminism was everywhere in the 1920s—women were demanding the right to choose romantic partners, go out unchaperoned, and generally make their own decisions, in addition to demanding places on sports teams. All the women in this film support each other: Ederle's mother Anna (Jeanette Hain) and sister Meg (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) support her desire to swim. Ederle's coach, Charlotte Epstein (Sian Clifford), pushes the swim team to excel. Little girls admire her and encourage her to persist. This version of events is substantially truthful, and yet it leads the film to omit the many other women who were successful swimmers in the 1920s, several of whom competed with Ederle to swim the Channel. This choice plays into the common trope where any woman who accomplishes something tends to be presented as a one-off, an anomaly, an exception to the general run of women who are only good for care work and cleaning. Ederle was not alone: women had always been part of swimming. Most Southeast Asian, African, and Native American women were excellent swimmers. Louisa May Alcott and her sisters had swimming lessons a century before Ederle, and women were among the first long-distance swimmers in England. Ederle herself knew dozens of women who were competitive swimmers, and she was racing to cross the Channel before one of them could—as it was, she beat the next successful swimmer, Mille Gade Corson, by only three weeks. The film suggests that Ederle's achievement ended inequality in sport, but even today, almost a century later and more than half a century after Title IX was passed, women in sport do not benefit from the same funding levels or privileges as men.The film's women-centered feminism also leaves out the many men who also supported Ederle's swimming career. While some men certainly stood in her way, her father, for instance, went to all her meets, funded much of her training, promised her a new car if she succeeded in swimming the Channel, accompanied her to France, and hired lawyers to enforce her contracts. He was very supportive of her swimming career. The film shows only Charlotte Epstein coaching the teenaged Ederle, but her real coach was a man: Louis deBreda Handley. It was Handley who insisted that Ederle must use the American crawl with flutter kick, not the usual breaststroke, to swim the Channel: another reason for her success (and the subsequent success of many other cross-Channel swimmers). Her first Channel coach, Jabez Wolff (Christopher Eccleston), is vilified, although Ederle's dislike of him may have been tinged with 1920s anti-Semitism. The film makes room for only one supportive man, Bill Burgess (Stephen Graham), the second man to successfully swim the Channel (in 1911), whose knowledge of the Channel's shifting tides provided the third pillar necessary for Ederle's (and others’) success. Burgess then appears as a white knight, helping a damsel in distress rather than a strong athlete. More importantly, the decision to obscure Ederle's other male allies lets today's men off the hook, wrongly suggesting that feminism is women's business and that the natural role of men is to oppose it.You should watch the film anyway. The experience of watching Daisy Ridley swimming from under the water—she trained with an Olympic swimmer and did her own swimming for the film, in the Black Sea off Bulgaria—is exceptional. A movie like Young Woman and the Sea, which joins thrilling camera work and considerable humor with a twenty-first century take on ambitious women and people with disabilities, is uplifting and encouraging.