REVIEW
SWIMMING POOL
Starring Ludivine Sagnier and Charlotte Rampling
Directed by François Ozon
Opens Friday, July 25
Globe Cinema
In five years and as many films, French director François Ozon has established himself as one of the most talented filmmakers of his generation. He is neither an innovator nor a stylist, but combines intelligence and sensitivity with an acute understanding of the iconography and mechanics of genre filmmaking.
Above all, he has excelled in building films around strong female characters, taken to extremes in last year’s Eight Women, but essential to his best previous work as well, as in Under the Sand or The Criminal Lovers.
All of this is true of Swimming Pool, yet the film fails to even add up to the sum of its parts, probably because its parts have all been recycled from the three aforementioned films – the half-comic, half-psychotic extended catfight from Eight Women, the astute and sympathetic portrait of a middle-age woman adrift from Under the Sand, and the quiet slide from idyll into horror of The Criminal Lovers. And then, of course, there’s the return of two of his most memorable leading ladies, Charlotte Rampling (the widow in Under The Sand) and Ludivine Sagnier (the kid in Eight Women). The only new element being some fairly shameless titillation – "Tits out!" appears to have been the most common directive on this set.
Yes, as this list suggests, any combination of these is worth at least a glance and, although it’s no masterpiece, Swimming Pool is far from a complete disaster, being reasonably sexy and fairly creepy, usually at the same time.
Rampling, in the role of a successful crime-fiction writer hoping to mix a working holiday with illicit romance, does a good job of portraying an intelligent but sexually and creatively frustrated Englishwoman, and goes a long way to overcoming the limitations of Ozon’s stereotypical view. Sagnier also puts in a creditable (if not always credible) performance as the Eurotrash houseguest from hell.
Ozon, for his part, has fun mixing two related but essentially different genres – the psychological thriller of 1950s Hitchcock and the preposterously English BBC crime dramas of more recent times.
But Swimming Pool could easily have been a lot better, with a slightly more elaborate plot and tighter editing. I have no complaints about the gratuitous sex. |
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