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SWIMMING POOL
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Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling, THE VERDICT) is a writer who so despises her work and her plodding series-detective, Dorwell, that she can barely summon the energy to think about writing her next potboiler. Her wise faintly smug publisher John Bosload (Charles Dance, whose career has now passed beyond the veil of leading-man studhood into the shadows of supporting caricature (GOSFORD PARK)and sophisticated corruption) offers her a writer's contemplative paradise--exclusive use of his enormous idyllic villa in France's green and rural Luberon– out of whosebeautiful solitude should emerge a new, career-changing novel.
Arriving, she sets up her laptop and mimes through the Obligatory Writer Scenes: staring at the white glowing screen, chin on folded hands, then coming to life and typing with seemingly professional verve … until her calm is shattered by the arrival of Bosload's daughter Julie (Ludivine Sagnier, 8 WOMEN). Julie is everything the emotionally shriveled Sarah is not: young, blonde, pneumatic, empty-headed, promiscuous, guiltless. Every morning Julie brings her breasts to the villa's swimming pool for display in the manner of a sidewalk vendor opening her kiosk, and sure enough upon announcing she is open for business, she attracts a steady stream of the country-French equivalent of passers-by, the least erotic men imaginable. These she nevertheless loudly screws, to Sarah's insomniac displeasure.
Director Francois Ozon doesn't care tuppence for men; in his films they barely figure as characters, being reduced to vanished drownees (UNDER THE SAND), dying invalids (8 WOMEN), or sperm vesicles queued up to man Julie's pumps. He does like women, both as individuals and as sex objects, and by suggesting they are emotionally complex he provides us with a bounty of nudity from both Julie and, embarrassingly, Sarah.
SWIMMING POOL is intended to be about the psychology of writing, how Sarah subverts and sublimates her feelings into her fiction, how she takes reality and transmogrifies it into drama. Ozon intercuts real events with Sarah's imaginings/ fantasies/ writings, which invariably run to the erotic, the necromantic. We are encouraged to believe that each gesture, each look,each throwaway comment,conceals a wheels-within-wheels plot …
But it doesn't. For all its buildup, the story's resolution is clumsy, silly, and unbelievable. Is it possible for an audience to be faked out by the overtones of double-cross, so that when there are no double-crosses, we are surprised? Or is that just the Emperor's-New-Clothes concealing bad scriptwriting, bad direction, and bad editing? When the characters mouth incongruous inanities and in the next scene are suddenly closest friends, are we to believe they are being false … or just badly written?
By the time we're done, we are offered a USUAL SUSPECTS twist on the whole previous tale(*), but unlike SUSPECTS (or MULHOLLAND DRIVE, which does this trick better, or MEMENTO,which does it best), where the twist causes us to reinterpret everything that came before, SWIMMING POOL ends not with a gasp but a grimace. UNDER THE SAND worked because the central mystery – her husband's disappearance – serves as the emotional driver for Rampling's subdued private pain of impassively grieving. SWIMMING POOL fails because, for all her wise reserve, Sarah Morton is emotionally closed and static, and the purported 'mystery' proves just a clumsy device for the director's emotional and physical voyeurism.
(*) If you've seen the movie and are in doubt about what the ending means, here is my view.