Swimming Pool

For quite some time, French director François Ozon impresses movie fans inside and outside France with productions like 8 Femmes, Sous le sable and Le temps qui reste. For the movie Swimming Pool, Ozon works for the second time with the English actress Charlotte Rampling. Her first appearance in an Ozon movie was in Sous le sable, where she played a mourning wife. Swimming Pool is inspired by Jacques Deray’s 1969 movie called La piscine starring Romy Schneider and Alain Delon.

Although Ozon is French, Swimming Pool is almost entirely in English. The movie starts in a rainy and dreary London, but quickly descends to the sunny south of French. There, the successfull English crime novelist Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling) takes a short break in the countryside house of her English publisher. Located in the beautiful Provence region, she meets the young and stunning daughter of her publisher, Julie. As she soon discovers, the loose and nymphomaniac girl has a preference for naked swimming, sunbathing and a weakness for men. The somewhat rigid Sarah Morton has a hard time dealing with someone that loose and the tension between the two is obvious and growing, right from the first encounter.

In the mean time, Morton, who finally overcame her writer’s block, is writing on a crime novel. As she sees more of Julie, she’s starting to get interested in Julie and her lifestyle. At first she tries to avoid her, but as the movie continues, the relation between the two gets better and better. Their lives seem to have more in common than they were thinking. In the second part of the film, an actual crime story is introduced, complete with a murder.

The movie starts slow and the stiff Sarah Morton doesn’t do much to get to a happy atmosphere. In the course of the film, when the tension between the characters declines, she gives more of herself and at those times Ramplings acting gets better. However, in a whole, Swimming Pool is too artificial and doesn’t really captivate the viewer. The plot is well thought out, Ludivine Sagnier is beautiful and she competes well with the more mature Rampling, but yet François Ozon’s movie isn’t a very convincing one. The movie’s theme - the thin line between fantasy and reality - is interesting, but badly developed. The end of the movie is therefore too much of a cliché and too much expected to be dramatical.

Swimming Pool (2003), with Charlotte Rampling, Ludivine Sagnier, Charles Dance. Director: François Ozon. 102 min.

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