A repressed British crime novelist travels to the south of France for a sojourn at her publisher’s summer house, where she hopes to write her next book. However, the peaceful stay is interrupted by an unexpected visit from the free-spirited daughter of the publisher. Sexual tensions, jealousy and unexpected twists all unfold in and around the villa’s swimming pool. This superb thriller, inspired by Deray’s La Piscine, remains one of Ozon’s finest films.
bfi.org.uk
François Ozon: The swimming pool stands for whatever anyone wants to see in it. I have often filmed water, usually the ocean which is associated in my mind with shedding one’s inhibitions, or with a certain sense of fear. In this instance, I was interested in the swimming pool as texture and also as water imprisoned. Swimming pools, unlike the ocean, are manageable and controlled.
The swimming-pool is Julie’s realm. It’s like a movie-screen against which images are projected and into which a character penetrates. Sarah Morton takes time before entering the pool: she does not do so until Julie has become a source of inspiration – and until the swimming-pool is at last clean.
Production notes
SPOILER WARNING The following notes give away some of the plot.
Like The Usual Suspects, Swimming Pool ends with a revelation that substantially alters what has gone before, but it begins with three smaller surprises. The first is that this is ‘A Film By’ – rather than ‘Un Film De’ – François Ozon. The second comes when the camera pulls back from a close-up of water, over which the title is superimposed, to reveal not a swimming pool but a river – a hint, perhaps, that we should heed the bigger picture. Another joke is contained within that image: it’s virtually the same opening as Ozon’s Under the Sand (2000), though here the camera pans up from the Thames, rather than down to the Seine. Once again it is Charlotte Rampling, with her buttoned-up clothes and buttoned-down desires, who flees the city for a rural hideaway. She plays Sarah Morton, a crime novelist who finds inspiration in her publisher John’s Provence retreat. Her tranquillity is disrupted by his teenage daughter Julie, with her hair extensions, clip-clopping heels and trail of uncouth one-night stands.
Whereas Under the Sand crushed Rampling’s brittle persona until it splintered, Swimming Pool gives her room to bloom luxuriously. But even her opening warning – ‘I am not the person you think I am’ – cannot prepare you for the glorious moment when she boogies stiffly to a raunchy disco number. Rampling also gets a nude scene which comes as a delightful shock after Ozon has lulled our eyes almost to the point of boredom with the bronzed body of Ludivine Sagnier, who plays Julie. It’s nice for anyone still recovering from The Night Porter (1974) to see Rampling in the hands of a director whose staging of sex is as playful as it is economic. A bobbing head, or a row of flexed toes, says all that needs to be expressed about the sex enjoyed by these characters, making it seem an awfully long time since Ozon had the temerity to show an erection, in his 1998 debut Sitcom.
Increasingly his talent lies in locating visual equivalents for amorphous pleasures and processes. Trying to depict artistic creation is a task that has undone directors as noteworthy as Joel Coen (in Barton Fink) and Stephen Frears (in Prick up Your Ears). In Swimming Pool, Ozon has devised a weightless metaphor to liberate himself from the cliché of the blank page in the typewriter. The clue is in the title: the pool on to which Sarah stares down each day is itself that page, the void on to which definition is gradually imposed. It begins as a murky lagoon where Julie completes laps beneath a tattoo of orange leaves on the water’s surface. Eventually, it becomes the setting for erotic dreams, and a murder. The removal of the tarpaulin cover, suggesting the opening of a new book, enhances the metaphor.
The film is ripe with allusions. The scenario of two women cooped up in an isolated house for a game of identity-swapping recalls Persona (1966), as well as Ozon’s own chilling featurette See the Sea (1997). The trail of dislocated noir motifs suggests Bertrand Blier’s icy deployment of genre conventions in Buffet Froid (1979). Like Deep End (1970), the film imagines the swimming pool as a font of erotic power, while the positioning of it at the centre of a psychological tug-of-war that is exclusively female strongly echoes Robert Altman’s 3 Women (1977). The women’s criminal collusion, and an exquisitely tense scene in which Sarah anticipates the discovery of a corpse in the pool, nods to Les Diaboliques (1954).
Swimming Pool also recalls those moments in Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) when the heroines plunge into the film’s interior narrative in order to avert its course. In this case Sarah manipulates the plot for the good of her novel. She conjures Julie because she, as the heroine of her own story, requires the friction of a nemesis. She dreams up a mutual object of desire to introduce erotic tension. And a bizarre network of surrogate family relationships is laid over the action; Sarah is both daughter and mistress to John, and sister and mother to Julie, while Julie jokingly passes off a lover as her father. We can only guess which of these relationships, if any, is ratified in Sarah’s novel, also called Swimming Pool. For now, the ambiguities intensify the picture’s hothouse atmosphere, making it all the more impressive that Ozon maintains such a consistently cool touch.
Ryan Gilbey, Sight and Sound, October 2003
Swimming Pool
Director: François Ozon
©/Presented by: Fidélité
©/In association with: Headforce Limited
©/Co-production: France 2 Cinéma, Gimages Films, Foz
With the participation of: Canal+
Producers: Olivier Delbosc, Marc Missonnier
Co-producer: Timothy Burrill
Line Producer: Christine de Jekel
Unit Managers: David Mitnik, Bruno Amestoy
Pre-production Manager (English Crew): Jo Farr
Production Manager (English Crew): Marshall Leviten
Production Accountant: Thierry Chapat
Accountant (English Crew): Jon Duncan
Location Manager (English Crew): Michael Harm
Director of Post-production (Fidélité): Mélanie Karlin
1st Assistant Director: Antoine Garceau
2nd Assistant Director: André Cavaillé
Script Supervisor: Agnès Feuvre
Casting: Antoinette Boulat
Casting (English Crew): Sarah Bird
Screenplay: François Ozon
With the collaboration of: Emmanuèle Bernheim
Director of Photography: Yorick Le Saux
Steadicam Operators: Jean-Baptiste Thibaud, Patrick de Ranter
Gaffer: Jean-Noël Viry
Key Grip: Carlos Ribeiro
Stills Photographer: Jean-Claude Moireau
Computer Graphics Designers: Daniel Esperanssa, Cyril Vonck
Editor: Monica Coleman
Assistant Editor: Frédéric Barbe
Art Director: Wouter Zoon
Assistant Art Director: David Lagache
Set Decorator: Brice Blasquez
Set Decorator (English Crew): Jane Cooke
Property Master: Jean-Louis Lalet
Costume Designer: Pascaline Chavanne
Wardrobe Mistress: Christine Vargas
Dresser: Chloé Lesueur
Make-up Artist: Gill Robillard
Hairstylist: Myriam Roger
Opening Credits: Aparté
Ending Credits: TEST
Original Score Composed by: Philippe Rombi
Musical Director: Richard Boudarham
Music Recorded/Mixed by: Stéphane Reichard
Recorder: Pascal Von Hatten
Re-recording Mixer: Jean-Pierre Laforce
Sound Editor: Benoît Hillebrant
Cast
Charlotte Rampling (Sarah Morton)
Ludivine Sagnier (Julie)
Charles Dance (John Bosload)
Marc Fayolle (Marcel)
Jean-Marie Lamour (Franck)
Mireille Mossé (Marcel’s daughter)
Michel Fau (1st man)
Jean-Claude Lecas (2nd man)
Émilie Gavois Kahn (waitress at café)
Erarde Forestali (old man)
Lauren Farrow (Julia)
Sebastian Harcombe (Terry Long)
Frances Cuka (lady on the Underground)
Keith Yeates (Sarah’s father)
Tricia Aileen (John Bosload’s secretary)
Glen Davies (pub barman)
France-UK 2002©
103 mins
35mm
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
Notes may be edited or abridged
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