Swimming Pool Review
by Andrew Staker (adonis_love AT hotmail DOT com)October 13th, 2003
SWIMMING POOL
The ever-elegant Charlotte Rampling plays Sarah Morton, a successful serial crime novelist in search of inspiration. Her boss suggests this might best be achieved in a stay at his holiday home in sunny France. Finally persuaded, she catches the train south. After acclimatizing herself to the rusticity of the place—which includes the charmingly dilapidated older caretaker Marcel (Marc Fayolle)—she basks in the sun and starts writing.
On one especially balmy night, her open-windowed sleep is broken by the unexpected arrival of a playful young woman, Julie (Ludivine Sagnier charges the screen with sexuality). The two women, one older, one younger, make an initial encounter tnhat is far from idyllic. They quarrel more and more, the tension growing ever stronger. Sarah looks at the juvenility of Julie's licentious behaviour—"a different man every night"—with intellectual condescension.
Unable to write because of the girl's loud and disruptive manner, Sarah takes refuge at the village inn, where she grows closer to the masculine bar tender Franck (Jean-Marie Lamour, looking very '70s pornstar). But then she has a brainwave. Why not write a novel around Julie? She'd be a perfect character. So Sarah ends her antagonisms and befriends Julie. All is well. But of course, our filmmaker is too skilled for such a peachy resolution. You'll have to watch to find out the rest.
François Ozon is a director whose scope is very broad. His previous film 8 women was a stylish comedy. He has collaborated with Charlotte Rampling in the dark and moody "Beneath the Sand" and with Ludivine Sagnier in "Waterdrops on Burning Rocks". The swimming pool in this film has a variety of symbolic functions. As does the constant repetition of characters lapping up the brilliant sunlight: we can almost feel the warm caresses they do. "Swimming Pool" looks gorgeous. The performances are irrepressible, never faltering. The way actions are used to express inner feelings, while also in parallel with comic moments, means that this film is engrossing. Ozon is a talented director and his hand in the thriller genre is a good one.
Andrew Staker
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