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Who wouldn't want to swipe right on a potential gold medalist? Well, one TikToker cracked the dating code when it comes to matching with athletes competing at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. "I paid for Tinder Plus so I can swipe in the Olympic Village and date an Olympian," Reed Kavner explained on the app, showing his geo-filter set to Tokyo, where the Games are taking place. As the video scrolled past dating profiles purported to belong to the likes of Estonian biathlete Grete Gaim and Canadian swimmer Katerine Savard, the audio remarked, "Boat, swim, wow winner, oh sh-t please don't kill me." The day after Reed shared his not-so-secret Olympic dating trick, he tweeted,...

Directed by former competitive swimmer Pascal Plante and featuring a two-time Olympic athlete in the title role, “Nadia, Butterfly” qualifies as both a sports movie and not-a-sports movie — which is to say, Plante’s aloof, intermittently engaging second feature takes a backstage look at a defining moment in a swimmer’s career, but it does so in a way that violates nearly all the rules of the game.

For starters, the film opens with the final race of Canadian swimmer Nadia Beaudry (Katerine Savard), at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, rather than building up to the big event and hitching drama on the question of whether she wins or loses. The genre has trained audiences to watch sports movies the way they do the events themselves, driven by the suspense of the outcome. Here, we know relatively early on that Nadia will go home with a medal, but not the best one,...

About halfway through Pascal Plante’s film “Nadia, Butterfly,” a young swimmer goes to a party in the Olympic village, decides that she needs to put on some music and selects the Italian national anthem in honor of her hosts, the Italian crew team. But when they ask her to play “O, Canada” in return, she demurs and finds a different anthem: Canadian singer Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated,” which has her singing lustily to the chorus line, “Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?”

It’s an appropriate theme song for the undeniably complicated Nadia, an Olympic swimmer who is retiring in her early 20s but is uncomfortable with the very idea of a life after athletics. But the movie itself doesn’t make her, or her story, any more complicated than it has to be – it’s a restrained and intimate character study that also...

Even if “Nadia, Butterfly” weren’t set during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics — the film offering an impressively staged glimpse into an alternate timeline where the world’s biggest sporting event hasn’t been postponed due to a pandemic — Pascal Plante’s sensitive and tactile second feature (following 2018 debut “Fake Tattoos”) would still feel like .

This intimate, unhurried story of a swimmer at the first major crossroads (or pool turn) of her life may not share the wry comic touch or May/December undercurrent of Sofia Coppola’s Japan-set romance, but it paints a similarly woozy portrait of self-discovery around a young woman who finds herself on the other side of the world. There’s even a karaoke sequence in the middle, a bittersweet drive back to Narita Airport at the end, and a bunch of Beach House cues on the soundtrack (a band that basically emerged from the morning-after haze left...

With “Nadia, Butterfly,” a Cannes-selected character study that follows a young swimmer in the immediate aftermath of her final race, Quebecois director Pascal Plante looked to explore the often-unseen side of the Olympic dream.

Building on his own experiences as a competitive swimmer as well as those of lead actress Katerine Savard – a real-life Olympian who competed in both London and Rio and who marks her acting debut with this film – Plante set his sophomore feature at the then-anticipated 2020 Tokyo games, even shooting large parts of the film in Japan.

While the games’ postponement until 2021 – coupled with ongoing uncertainty as to whether they will even take place at all – now lends that context a slightly counterfactual aspect, the narrative’s tight focus on an athlete’s inner life make the film feel evergreen.

“The film is a microscopic study of a woman at a certain point,” Plante explains. “I thought...