Premier bain

The scouts

Two minutes of people swimming on New Year's Day sounds like the definition of consensus—beautiful, tender, collective—which is exactly why I'm suspicious it works at all; if Gosselin's actually made something subversive out of this setup, I need to see the angle that makes it bite.

Gosselin locates herself in a lineage of observational cinema that treats collective ritual as form—there's rigor in letting a moment like this breathe without narrative scaffolding, and the formal restraint of two minutes suggests someone thinking carefully about what duration and framing can hold.

The decision to film a mass swim without voiceover or editorial intervention is the whole film, and if it works, it's because Gosselin understood that one choice—to trust the image and the collective body as enough—transforms documentation into something intimate.