MIDDLE-AGED WHITE BRIT FEMALE. Writer by trade. Genre: crime fiction. Taut facial features but smile hidden underneath, awaiting the sight of male member. Hopefully tumescent. Bad relationship with publisher. Fantasies about Greeks. Types on laptop. Uncomfortable, but life is hard. Needs change. Needs inspiration. Lots of need. Tons of need. One sum-up word: Needy.
How many body pans can you stand? You know, the reclining shots where the camera begins at the toes and worms its way (slowly) up the female body? In Swimming Pool by Francois Ozon you see this shot several times. Way too many times. It's soft core porn with a fairly good story. Unfortunately, the story is not good enough to cover up the fact that it's soft core pornography. Ozon has been called "Europe's most daring and inventive writer/director" so that should give you a fairly good idea of what you're in for if you spend an hour and 43 minutes watching this film. Oh, wait: I guess if you live in Europe and take a recommendation like that seriously, I should try and make my point from another angle.
Charles Dance plays the publisher who offers his goosey golden-egg writer, played by Charlotte Rampling, a vacation at his empty house in Lubéron, in the South of France. She's obviously stressed out and miserable, if the cut of her jib is any indication. Shortly after she arrives and just as she's settling down to some serious work on that laptop, the publisher's nymphomaniac daughter arrives, played by Ludivine Sagnier and her breasteses.
The way Rampling's character wolfs down her food and sucks on her cigarettes while on vacation, along with the oh-so-symbolic removal of the wooden cross above the bed where she sleeps, tells us all we need to know about the mystery writer. The bouncing boobs and the naked men in the bed asleep the next morning tell us all we need to know about the daughter. So what is left to tell? The way two very different people can morph into each other when thrust together in a strange locale? The way we sometimes cannot separate fiction from fact? I'm not sure what the point was in this story, or even if there was one, aside from the body pans. It's not often you see a film with primarily female protagonists. When you do, it should be done with fewer gratuitous boob-shots than this. Try Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers or his Persona or Robert Altman's 3 Women for films that might mean something over and above childish sexual fantasies.
Ozon wrote this in collaboration with French novelist and screenwriter Emmanuèle Bernheim. They worked together on a previous film, Under the Sand, which I didn't see and probably won't.
"Ozon means to have perversity speak for him, but in the end, it doesn’t have a lot to say."
-- Ella Taylor from the LA Weekly