**/**** Image B- Sound A- Extras B-
starring Charlotte Rampling, Ludivine Sagnier, Charles Dance, Marc Fayolle
screenplay by François Ozon and Emmanuele Bernheim
directed by François Ozon
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover On evidence of the four films of his released theatrically in North America, François Ozon has two modes: a hyper-real pastiche on someone else's work ( Water Drops on Burning Rocks, 8 Women) and a more conventionally realistic gloss on his own material (Under the Sand and now Swimming Pool). I must say that I prefer the former to the latter, as there's nothing particularly radical about the director's own ideas (which often veer off into cliché) and his style, unlike in his crazy adaptations, reads nothing into the material that might redeem it from its own limitations. Swimming Pool is a classic example of this, with a listless look barely propping up a standard-issue script fit for those who fancy themselves culturally aware but were born yesterday as far as the art of the cinema is concerned.
Charlotte Rampling plays Sarah Morton, a stereotypically uptight British crime novelist who's blocked about her latest mystery. Her editor John (Charles Dance) thinks that a change of scenery is all that's needed, and lends her the use of his French country house for a little peace and quiet. Unfortunately for her, a stereotypical troubled free-spirit is about to show up to raise hell: Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), the rebellious daughter that John never mentioned. Though at first apoplectic at the intrusion of the rude and oversexed housemate, who likes to skinny-dip in the swimming pool of the film's title, Sarah gradually sees Julie's pain and begins to want to write about her.
It's all pretty much by the book. Sarah is going to learn lots about herself and lose her stick-in-the-mud posturing; Julie will be defiant but sad, her promiscuity a result of her distant relationship with her father. And the trappings–literary heroine, French country house–are too obviously bandied about to serve as anything other than classy commodities for the audience to consume. There are also some thoroughly ho-hum "shockers" built into the plot, which I won't divulge here; let it be known that they're simply Ozon treading water, trying to beef up the film's plot once his clichés have given up all of their secrets.
Still, the film might have had some interest if it had the same studio-bound aesthetics as his more successful Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women, where the décor had as much bearing on the action as the narratives. It might have at least been more fun to have heightened the artificial geometry of the plot, which blasted Drops through the ceiling, but Swimming Pool is directed on autopilot, with a lethargic camera and largely natural lighting adding up to some very dull visuals. The film cries out for some cinematic comment on the action that never arrives, leaving us with the meat-and-potatoes of the dreary plot and nothing to spice them up.
One can't fault the performances. After a career of being sex objects in films like Zardoz and The Night Porter, Rampling has finally come into her own, and gives the repressed Sarah a haughtiness and a frustration that go well beyond her limited range as a character. And Ozon axiom Sagnier is equally fine in what I believe is her first English-language role–not only does she bring poignancy to her role as angry Julie, she also manages to make her heavily-accented English seem like that of the character's and not her own. But even these valiant efforts aren't enough to make the film more than slightly average, and they sure aren't enough to recommend it.
THE DVD
by Bill Chambers Available as an import from Canada, Seville's "Signature Collection" DVD of Swimming Pool is something of a disappointment. Like the Canadian release of The Pianist, the 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer comes from a converted PAL source (even though the American version boasts an NTSC master), and the situation is further aggravated by faint white streaks that cause interference throughout the blue-on-black opening credits. (Accounting for the five-frames-per-second discrepancy between PAL and NTSC (something I neglected to do in my portion of FILM FREAK CENTRAL's Jet Lag review), Swimming Pool's 98-minute running time would seem to align with the 103-minute length of the "unrated" Stateside platter.) More successful is the Dolby Digital 5.1 mix, though the film doesn't really call the discrete channels to action–hence you won't hear me bitching about this disc's absence of the DTS track that decorates the American DVD.
Totalling 13 minutes, the block of four deleted sequences will bore all but lifelong Sunday drivers: with one notable exception (Sarah telling her publisher that her novel is "turning into something rather bizarre"), these are endless montages of Sarah sightseeing that feel like outtakes from "Scenic Route: The Movie." Also on board are two "featurettes," ostensibly identical except for the responses being in English in one and in French in the other; in both, a series of questions is presented as title cards first to Charlotte Rampling, then to Ludivine Sagnier (who is inconceivably breathtaking here), then to François Ozon. What's curious is that, at 31 minutes, the French featurette runs five minutes longer than its English counterpart, calling to mind a bilingual airplane captain's pre-take-off shpiel, which always sounds far more detailed en français. For what it's worth, the stuttered pacing works against this Q&A, and the line of inquiry is stuck in the shallow end, so to speak, though Sagnier puts creative spins on stock answers, remarking, for instance, that her relaxed attitude towards nudity stems from the fact that she has a really nice body. I agree. (Sagnier's also the only interviewee to observe that Swimming Pool marks an "encounter between two sides of [Ozon's] work.") A gallery of production stills plus trailers for Swimming Pool, 8 Women, Talk to Her, and Vidocq round out the platter.
98 minutes (see review); Unrated; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, French DD 2.0 (Stereo); French subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Seville
