TNMC

A Review of the Swimming Pool: Unrated DVD 

When countless critics rained praise upon Francois Ozon’s 2003 erotic thriller Swimming Pool, I added it to the long list of movies I need to get around to see. My friend Caela told me it was a playful mystery while her boyfriend Ed told me “if you like naked chicks walking around a pool for an hour and a half, see Swimming Pool.” When it arrived on DVD, I picked it up at a used DVD store and what I found, when watching it, was a film eerily similar to the two films I had screened in my Film History lecture the week before: Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic Blow Up (which would become completely reworked and turned around for both Coppolla’s The Conversation and De Palma’s Blow Out) and Ingmar Bergman’s frustratingly sensual drama Persona (also produced in 1966).

Antonioni’s film follows Thomas (David Hemmings) as a bored and unemotional fashion photographer in swinging London. He looks to drugs, work, sex, art, for any sort of personal meaning and finds his definition in none of them. Frustrated with an afternoon photo shoot, he retreats to a country park where he photographs a man and his lover, Jane (Vanessa Redgrave). Jane pursues Thomas, attempts to bribe and seduce him for the photographs he has taken but Thomas returns to his dark room and finds images of what appear to be a murder. Thomas keeps asking himself if he is really seeing what he thinks he is seeing and searches out evidence to support his photos.

While Blow Up will extremely disappoint those in search of a Hitchcock-esque thriller, it will also prove to be a more meaningful and important work of film. What makes Blow Up so frustrating and groundbreaking, the same traits Swimming Pool attempts to bring out in the same sort of exercise, is that the film is not about the murder, it is about the meaning Thomas attempts to place on a photograph in order to make his mundane life not only more interesting but involving.

As aforementioned, Swimming Pool shamelessly exploits Antonioni’s film. Whereas Coppolla built a thriller that stood by itself, carried its own meaning, and broke new technological ground (specifically in sound editing), Swimming Pool is nothing fresh or exciting.

It’s formula has long become old and tired.

Swimming Pool, like Blow Up, follows a protagonist bored with their job and life. This time, however, it is successful mystery novelist Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling). She is rigid, conservative, and seems to find little joy in life. Her publisher, John Bosload (Charles Dance), takes note of this and advises her to spend the summer working on her new novel at his villa in the south of France. Upon her arrival, she meets her character foil in Bosload’s sexy and free spirited daughter Julie. Sarah is annoyed, curious, and disgusted by Julie, who sleeps with a handful of men and shamelessly walks around the villa nude. Of course, again in copycat homage to Blow Up, a murder occurs and Sarah continually seeks an answer to the events taking place around her.

The most interesting aspect of the film is not the murder but the change in Sarah’s character traits after being exposed to Julie and her lifestyle throughout the film. The audience watches as Sarah goes from a prudish conservative to a ruthless woman, exploiting men with her body. However, this aspect of the film is also stolen from another, more effective, film: Bergman’s Persona.

Bergman’s Persona is a film about the dynamic between two woman: a mute actress (Liv Ullmann) and her nurse (Bibi Andersson). The two women spend the summer alone at an isolated house. As they begin to spend more and more time together, the women’s personalities begin to merge. Even the actresses who portray them look alike. As Ebert writes in his assessment of the film, both personalities cannot survive this encounter, “the title is the key. Persona. Singular.”

After viewing the film, Swimming Pool is just a disappointing blend of two far superior films with a heavy glaze of sex and nudity utilized as a shroud to hide its lack of originality. Check out the DVD if you want: the audio and video transfers are adequate, one of the sex scenes is slightly more graphic, and it has about ten minutes of deleted scenes on it. However, it should be advised that you’d be better off checking out either Persona or Blow Up, the latter of which was just released by Warner Brothers with a widescreen transfer, a music only track showcasing the score by jazz great Herbie Hancock and a performance by the Byrds, and a commentary track by author and film historian Peter Brunette.