Swimming Pool (Unrated Edtion)

The refined Charlotte Rampling stars as Sarah Morton, a successful British mystery writer who is suffering from an extreme case of writer's block. She visits the office of her publisher, John Bosload (played with pompous reserve by Charles Dance), and he offers her his French summer home. It is in an idyllic location, secluded from the rest of the world, and yet is only a short walk from the heart of the nearest village. Sarah snaps up the offer.

The French retreat proves to be just what the writer needed, and in no time Sarah is feverishly click-clacking away at her word processor. Soon, however, her tranquil setting is ruined by the arrival of Bosload's daughter, Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), and then the real fun begins. To tell you any more of the plot would be to take away from your enjoyment of the film. Watching how it all unfolds is part of the pleasure. Needless to say, the film takes some bizarre turns.

The characters in "Swimming Pool" are their own interesting separate entities. Most of our information about Sarah Morton comes from watching her react to situations, whether they be the fresh, serene surroundings of the French home, or the rude, over-sexed goings-on of the young Julie. We are given dabs of knowledge about her past every now and then, but just enough to make us wonder about her more. Julie is an enigma, as well. She definitely lives through her body. She uses it to get her way with men, to try and bluster the taciturn Sarah, and to please her own self. She appears to be quite forthcoming about her life, but yet you suspect that there is much, much more to her than meets the eye. I even wanted to know more about Sarah's publisher, John Bosload. His life is touched upon somewhat, but just enough to make you more curious.

It is true that "Swimming Pool" is very much about presentation. Yes, it has a plot which develops, but I was fascinated more by *how* it developed. From the film's leisurely pace whilst Sarah takes-in her French surroundings, to the erotic turn it takes once Julie arrives on the scene, to the dark and mysterious corners that it explores a little later, "Swimming Pool" doesn't for a moment pretend to pander to you. You are never lulled into a feeling of boredom or predictability. I would be reticent at this point if I failed to mention that this film is quite explicit with its sexuality. If this bothers you, then do not go see it. We are given full shots of Ludivine Sagnier lying nude by the pool, copulating with numerous Frenchmen, and we even see one of the Frenchmen in a state of arousal. Also, though most of the dialogue is in English, there are spots in it which are spoken in French (with English sub-titles). If you are fine with this, and can continue to enjoy the film for what it is, then I highly recommend it.

As I stated at the start of this review, "Swimming Pool" was a unique movie-going experience. The film is part art-house flick, part soft-core exploitation, and part mystery. Kudos are in order for writer and director Francois Ozon for bringing those elements so exquisitely together. The movie leaves one with quite an impression.


Purely Symbolism   September 18, 2005
Elias El Hayek (Honduras)
22 out of 29 found this review helpful

SWIMMING POOL : AN ANALYSIS by Alan C. Shaw Ph. D.

This was an excellent movie only if you're willing to work through the symbolism, rather than have things handed to you as in normal cinematic fare. I do believe it made sense, even the ending, but like I said, you have to work for it.

Sarah is a woman struggling with a dark past of sexual abuse by her father. The experience began at the age of 13 and has clouded everything in her life and affected all of her relationships, and she works through it through her writing. The abuse destroyed her ability to have healthy relationships with men and women and turned her into a repressed recluse. You can see this from the very beginning when she doesn't want to deal with people in the real world of the subway train. In fact, it seems she feels that something inside of her was murdered by the abuse, and she feels unclear about who to blame. So her stories are all about murder mysteries. Solving this type of crime becomes her passion.

With this as the backdrop, the movie's plot makes sense. By writing her books she has been trying to escape her misery and somehow resolve a crime that has destroyed her life. But her publisher doesn't get it. He sees the murder mysteries as a good thing in and of themselves because they are making money for him, not as a means to an end as she sees it. The publisher is also having a sexual relationship with her and so she connects him with her father--as she does all men who have sex with her. So, of course, when he mentioned he has a daughter she identifies with this daughter and ultimately gets fixated on her. Sarah's sexual relationship with the publisher inspires her to write because it connects her to the issues with her father, which expresses itself as a murder mystery in her stories. So she goes to his French home expecting to have sex with him again and write another novel.

At first it's business as usual, and she is starting to make progress. But then something very different begins to unfold. John, the publisher, doesn't come and instead Sarah is forced to confront "Julie." Since she gets the daughter's name slightly wrong as "Julie" instead of the correct name of "Julia," we are being told that Julie is not real, but only a person imagined by Sarah. Earlier, the publisher had mentioned that he might not be coming because of his daughter, and then when the daughter as "Julie" surprises Sarah by showing up unannounced one night, we find ourselves digging deeper into Sarah's traumatic issues. Julie tells Sarah that Sarah has the good room because it has the view of the swimming pool, and the pool comes into the story as a construct representing a collection of issues in Sarah's mind.

Julie swims in the pool beneath the surface and encourages Sarah to do the same, but Sarah thinks it's full of filth, and indeed the pool is dirty. Yet Sarah is clearly intrigued by the pool and by the expressive sexuality of Julie which are clearly connected issues. Even though she is intrigued, Sarah does not go into the pool herself until it is cleared up by the work of Marcel. Marcel has a funny relationship with Julie, since Julie referred to him as her father, and so his connection to the pool and to cleaning up the issues that need to be resolved becomes progressively clearer.

But first we must probe deeper into that pool of issues and what do we find? When she first arrived at the chateau she found the egg-shaped urn (it can't just be a vase), so we begin to see a theme of death and birth. The ashes of the urn likely symbolize the death of her old self and the egg involves the birth of her new self, and there is some tension between the two. This is played out through the tension seen constantly between Julie and Sarah. Over the bed Sarah finds a cross which she immediately takes down because sex does not represent something sacred to her, but something defiled. To Sarah, Julie's freeness with sex means she is also defiled. That is why Julie's sex life is so debased, even causing Julie to get bruised. Julie is Sarah as a child, abused at 13, unable to embrace love at 16. The c-section scar on Julie fits into this tension if it suggest that the repressed Sarah was artificially born out of the unrepressed Julie. A cut was made between the old and the new Sarah and a scar representing a torn reality is left behind.

Facing her younger self, Sarah tries to imagine how her mother would disapprove of Julie's sexual activity, and she expresses this to Julie. And later in the story Julie believes Sarah to be her long lost mother. But Julie collapses when Sarah denies the mother, because the relationship with the mother has been lost in the horror of sexual abuse from the father. The mother is missing from this story and finding the mother and reuniting with her is part of Julie's quest. That is why the dwarf appeared who represented both the wife and the daughter of Marcel who himself represents the father. We know Marcel is a representation of the father because of what Julie said about this and because he later has sex with Sarah in Julie's room. The dwarf has a confused relationship with Marcel. At first she is his wife and then his daughter. In fact, she is half of both, wife and daughter, and it is appropriate because the movie is about what happened when that line was crossed in a sexual relationship between a father and daughter. As the terrified daughter, she tells Sarah that the mother was not murdered. But the fear in the Dwarf's eyes makes it clear that she is afraid that maybe the mother was murdered. This guilt seems to indicate that after the abuse from the father, Sarah worried that maybe she was responsible through leading him on by being promiscuous. As mentioned before, Julie's promiscuity personifies this guilt. This is what has driven her to become repressed, afraid of the implications of her interest in sexual fulfillment. When the dwarf refers to the car wreck she is referring to the sexual abuse that has killed the relationship with the mother and gave Julie/Sarah her scarred life. Sarah has been trying to determine who was responsible through her many books about murder mysteries and now the mystery of the death of Frank gives her another chance to try to resolve the issue.

Julie is a self-aware construction of Sarah's mind, because she has read what Sarah has written about her. So Julie knows what Sarah needs her to do. She goes and finds Frank, and sets him up to be in between the two of them. Thus, they play out the tension that existed between the father, the mother and the daughter. And at some point the mother figure retires and the interest between Frank and the daughter plays itself out. Daughters often have crushes on their fathers, so Julie's attempts to seduce him aren't really the issue. The issue is that Frank does respond, and he responds right in the middle of the pool. Right in the center of Sarah's mental struggle, the pool of her mind. There she finds Frank, yet another father figure sexually involved with the promiscuous daughter. And Sarah must stop it somehow, so she throws a rock to interrupt what is happening. It works, but Julie knows better than Sarah that she cannot let Frank off the hook. For the sake of the book (which represents Sarah's attempt to resolve her trauma) Julie must play this out.

Julie/Sarah wanted the father to want her more than he wanted the mother, but Frank, as the father, ultimately wanted the mother more. Julie's jealously leads her to kill him, but what does that death of this father figure ultimately mean? It is up to Sarah to find out by trying to uncover once and for all what is really going on inside of Julie. This leads Sarah to investigate the murder, but in the end she resolves it by going to Julie and asking her to tell her what happened. Julie does and reveals that she killed him to help Sarah finish the book. Sarah writes about murders, and she needs a murder to ultimately finish the book that takes a deeper look into her consciousness, into the depths of the pool of her mind. Since it is possible that the book might resolve the guilt Sarah feels, Julie knows that she must murder off the father in the hopes of perhaps bringing back a relationship with the mother. The father was the one who was wrong, not her, and so by killing him she proves her loyalty to the mother.

After this realization the tension is gone between Sarah and Julie. Together they bury the body and end the rift. When Marcel appears to be about to dig it up, she brings him back to room of Julie and offers herself to him once more. But this time she does not appear serious about him, almost like she is not afraid of this memory anymore. He no longer has power over her. Next, Julie is no longer needed and so she leaves. But she sends a letter essentially saying the book can now be shared that brings the mother back into her life. Having the story of her mother back in her life allows her to be in touch with the emotions that she has so long repressed and now she can become a more profound writer. She can now bare her soul without shame and in doing so she can finally write her best work.

But father figures in her life like John who have had sex with her would never let her bare her soul and tell her story. They want her to stay repressed. Knowing this, she breaks free from John and returns only to show him the book that has put an end to their relationship. And when she sees the real Julia while doing this, someone she had never met, she has the triumphant image of the mothers and the daughters reconciled in spite of abusive fathers. She sees herself waving to the real Julia, who after all was the idea that sparked her breakthrough. Then she sees herself as the child Julie waving to herself as the mother in the red dress she found earlier. The "red dress" could represent the "redress" of


SOMEWHAT ARTSY, SOME INESSENTIAL NUDITY, BUT INTRIGUING PLOT   October 24, 2003
Shashank Tripathi (Gadabout)
21 out of 29 found this review helpful

Barring the highfalutin artsy stuff, I'd equate this movie with "Memento."

Yes, it's that good, one of those rare films that exist on two different levels -- once you've seen them and understand what was actually going on, you have to see them again, when they turn out to be an entirely different film. Can't help loving films that exist on that level, particularly when they're cleverly constructed.

A word needs to be said about the stunning performances, courtesy especially of the charming Charlotte Rampling and her wonderful co-actor Ludivine Sagnier (for whom Ozon wrote the movie) who does her Lolita-type jig as a nymphy teenage daughter. Which understandably means that there's a great deal of toplessness (nudity) going on, some of it rather inessential if my prissy opinion was asked for, but don't let that keep you (would it?)

It's a riveting plot, don't read too much into the negative reviews. To me the ending was not terribly opaque but it was to my three companions, so take your chances. Recommended!


Intoxicating!!!   July 12, 2003
Mark Twain (www.chismetime.com)
19 out of 21 found this review helpful

Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling) is a British mystery writer at the very end of her creative rope. Hoping to recharge her creative batteries, Sarah takes off to stay at her publisher's house in rural France for a long holiday. Once there, Sarah finds that the open air and countryside agree with her, and soon, she begins writing again. Enter Julie (Ludivine Sagnier from Ozon's 8 Women), the publisher's young daughter, who has come to stay at the house as well. While Sarah tries desperately to work, her interest in Julie's volcanic life, both sexual and personal, boils over and begins to consume her writing and sanity.

Refreshingly, `Swimming Pool' is a kind of old fashioned sexually themed mystery that few attempt anymore. The film comes from the mind of Francois Ozon, famed French filmmaker, and one who has made it a point to keep his career fresh with ever changing genre explorations (`Under The Sand,' `Water Drops On Burning Rocks'). His last film was the certifiable everything-but-the-kitchen-sink musical/mystery `8 Women,' and showcased that even when the material isn't all that sturdy to support Ozon's insanity, he still can create some compelling cinema. This is his first English language film and it is definitely a refreshing change from all the lackluster summer films.

`Swimming Pool' takes place in a creative dream state in which reality can be hard to distinguish from the creative process. Ozon has decided to wrap a formulaic murder plot around this theme, taking the audience on a journey in which nothing is quite what it seems. To achieve full audience attention, the picture is also peppered with liberal nudity (Sangnier's character requires it) and heated sexual situations, mixing with the other elements to form an engrossing mystery which, eventually, has no resolution. As the film progresses, Ozon gets more abstract with his ideas, at the same time dropping clues to where this is all headed. `Swimming Pool' does have moments where it's utterly intoxicating and mysterious. There are some brilliant moments of suspense that would make Hitchcock proud.

Reuniting with her `Under The Sand' director, legendary actress Charlotte Rampling seems to have found her acting niche with Ozon. This is a very mannered performance, with the audience following Sarah as she metamorphoses from an uptight snob, making careful choices in food, men, and ideals, to the laid back woman she becomes with Julie, partaking in drugs, friendliness, and voyeurism. Rampling connects the dots without skipping a beat, making Ozon's eventual explanation for all these events somewhat of a let down. She's great in a film that ultimately fails her, but it's often worth the time just to see how Rampling and Ozon get themselves out of these bizarre situations.

This is a wonderful thriller, recommended to those who like to think and enjoy long discussions about the film right afterward. A deliciously clever mystery with bite.