Director - François Ozon
STARRING: Charlotte Rampling, Ludivine Sagnier, Charles Dance
102 Minutes Rated R for strong sexual content, nudity, language, some violence and
drug use.
There are a few things thing that make Swimming Pool a
predictable film, and there are a few things that don’t. It really is
classic, predictable Ozon. Take for example his lecherous Water Drops
on Burning Rocks (2000), a film that plays with itself like an
obscene Rohmer script in three acts. Its form is timeless and classic,
but somehow Ozon manages to turn the convention on its head through the
storyline. Much in the same way, Swimming Pool is a classic
mystery thriller, but one that manipulates itself to a rather
unconventional level of mystery and leaves us with a wry unexpected
twist that alters our perception of the entire film. Where the film gets
highly unpredictable is that Swimming Pool’s twist turns out to
be uncharted waters, even for someone like Ozon.
As is customary for Ozon, the camerawork in Swimming Pool is alluring,
almost sensual. Similar to his other 2000 film, Under the Sand,
his shots more frame states of mind than they frame characters. He
places people in scenes by means of composition as Hitchcock often did,
but with a certain continental flare. We move from texture to texture
and focus to focus under the influence of some cinematic rhythm. Guided
by this visual precision, Ozon takes us from a listless and despondent
London to a charming villa in Southern France. The first quarter of the
film is dominated by these silent sequences in which we simply watch
Rampling explore this gentle shift in her environment. It may be these
subtle psychological passages that Ozon has a gift for catching on film.
The script itself is by Ozon. It's Claire's Knee meets Vertigo
or something of that nature. The story unfolds at a clever pace and even
though at times it unravels by the numbers, we don't mind because
Rampling pulls it off with a frightening ease. Rampling plays Sarah
Morton, the writer of a famous churlish detective series. Coming to
grips with the fact that she is a potential has-been, she visits the
office of her beguiling agent, a man transparently interested in Sarah
as a cash-cow. So he advises her to take some time off at his French
villa, and perhaps write a new book while she is there.
After a few days, to her unveiled dismay, her agent's teenage daughter
pops in for a holiday as well. Equal parts, shameless lust, sordid
charm, evenly tanned skin, and je ne sais quois, Julie’s reckless
abandon is a startling dialectic to Sarah’s British rigor. Everything
from Julie’s dirty relationships with older men from surrounding towns
to the foods she fills up the fridge with stand in contradistinction to
Sarah’s emotional repression and ascetic diet. The delicate friendship
they eventually forge occurs through conversations about Julie’s distant
mother, and the hesitant rifling of Julie’s private journal rekindles
Sarah’s literary genius. She begins to write a book, no doubt starring
Julie and the clues that comprise the mystery of who she is. And as she
writes, the narrative takes a few strange steps into the other side of
the looking glass. On this side of the story we find that Sarah and
Julie may not be all that different after all, and the cool blue water
of the swimming pool becomes the backdrop for the stuff only the best
dime store crime novels are made of.
All of these brilliantly crafted relationships unravel in the last frame
of the film, closing on Rampling’s intriguing smile. The book she brings
back from her vacation is like nothing she has ever published, not your
average pulp “whodunit.” And as it turns out, neither is Swimming
Pool. What seemed to be straightforward storytelling is revealed as
an intimate character study. What seemed to be mysterious really just
turns out to be intentionally vague. Some may leave the film
underwhelmed; feeling tricked into a conclusion that raises more
questions than the film has the ability to answer. But taken as a
brilliant psychological adventure Swimming Pool has the fortunate
position of being able to spurn such analysis, and the turn toward the
inexplicable at the end of the film only serves to add more depth to a
character that it seemed Rampling had taken as far as she could go.
© September 2003
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