A homophobic swimming coach has to mend his ways in a French film let down by crude caricature and leaden plotting
A professional swimmer, disgraced after blurting a homophobic slur on live television, must redeem himself by coaching an amateur gay water polo team. A blend of culture-clash
comedy, sporting underdog tale and road movie, The Shiny Shrimps has a rambunctious, carnivalesque quality, but it’s also full of crude cliches and stereotypes. With its reliance on montage sequences and broad humour, it dips into the same lukewarm chlorinated water as Swimming With Men, albeit with more glitter and jokes about anal tattoos.
Ultra-competitive and driven, at the expense of his marriage and possibly his relationship with his daughter, Matthias Le Goff (Nicolas Gob) finds it hard to understand the ethos of Shrimps founder Jean (Alban Lenoir), who would “rather lose with those I love than win alone”. And since trans woman Fred (Romain Brau) is preoccupied with perfecting a dance routine, chunky Cédric (Michaël Abiteboul) is struggling with fatherhood, and the rest of the team are more interested in scoring drugs than goals, losing seems likely. The plot points couldn’t be more obvious if they dived off the top board in full drag.