Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Let no one say there are no feelgood stories left in the movie business. Spry sports drama Young Woman and the Sea was greenlit as one more piece of streaming content among so many others for Disney+. The true story of Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926, the finished product then charmed test audiences enough to secure an oldfangled theatrical release. It is no more than director Joachim Rønning deserves. The film is far better than it probably needed to be while also doing nothing other than what you would expect.A bell will be rung for audiences who saw Nyad, last year’s biopic of ultra-distance swimmer Diana Nyad. That film pressed a complex woman into the shape of a Hollywood heroine to not wholly convincing effect. Rønning makes a far more persuasive case for Ederle as a model of underdog pluck. The backdrop is hardscrabble Manhattan, where her German immigrant parents run a butcher’s shop. “Trudy” is played by Daisy Ridley, her grin a tribute to the dentistry in pre-Depression Amsterdam Avenue. But then, everything here gleams. The tenements twinkle so vividly you want to pack a bag and move in.So far, so Disney. But the prettification somehow reads as respect for the subject. The story is framed as proto-feminist triumph — and rightly so. If the second-class status of girls and women in early-20th-century swimming could seem minor in the wider patriarchal context, the film works hard to give it heft. It comes to feel symbolic of other inequities, and urgent given Trudy’s talent.And yet the mood is buoyant, sexist skulduggery undone to a rousing score. It would take a churl to object to the schmaltz, which is partly down to Ederle’s achievements, but also to Rønning, investing a workaday script with palpable care. And Ridley is good as well, slathered in porpoise fat, radiating purpose. It feels like a strength, rather than a spoiler, that we never doubt she will get us safely from one side of the movie to the other.★★★☆☆In UK and US cinemas from May 31
