Swimming Pool

Director: François Ozon (France, UK). Year of Release: 2003.

London. We see the Thames and Big Ben in the distance before descending into the tube. Some people are dozing in the train, others are reading the Daily Telegraph, Metro, or even books. We can tell it’s 20 years ago, as no-one is looking at their phone. A woman looks at the photo on the back of her book and recognises the lady sitting opposite. “Aren’t you Sarah Morton?”, she asks. “Oh no”, the woman replies, making for the exit. “You must be mistaking me with someone else.”

We next see Sarah entering her publisher’s office. When the publisher, John, asks how the latest Inspector Dorwell book is going, Sarah admits that she’s hit a bit of a dead end. As a way of dealing with her writer’s block. John suggests that she takes a holiday in his French chalet. It’s off season, but the chalet does have its own swimming pool. On more than one occasion Sarah asks John if he’ll visit her when she’s out there, On more than one occasion, John evades answering.

At first, Sarah enjoys the atmosphere, choosing a bedroom looking out onto the pool (still covered over and full of leaves), and chatting to the locals in decent French. She is even inspired to write again, typing away on her laptop and saving the files in a folder called “Dorwell On Holiday” or somesuch. Then, one night, she hears a noise downstairs, unscrews the lightbulb from the bedroom light, and heads downstairs carrying her makeshift weapon.

Enter Julie, John’s daughter from an affair with a French woman. Julie has got bored with her job and decided to spend some time in her father’s chalet. Will no-one think of the poor rich white kids? Julie is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl before they were invented. We will see her breasts many times. You might argue that as director François Ozon is gay (I didn’t just make that up, did I?), this doesn’t contain the same leer of some male directors, but the semi-nudity often feels gratuitous.

Sarah just wants to write her novel in peace, while Julie would like to have noisy sex with a different man every night. The men seem random, and Julie is clearly punching below her weight. Although Sarah will later admit that she did experience the swinging sixties, she has since become prim, always cleaning up. Julie calls her “an uptight Englishwoman who writes about dirty thoughts but never does them.” The two agree to spend as little time as possible in each other’s company.

It is as if Sarah resents the younger woman having the freedoms that she no longer feels are hers. Julie, in turn, feels little empathy with Sarah, to whom she refers in loud phone conversations as “the old woman”. At the same time, Sarah is intrigued by the younger woman. Julie says that the bruise under her eye is from a man she fought with, but you should see the other guy. And the scar on her stomach is from an accident, possibly the same accident in which her mother died.

This is another thing. Julie continues to refer to her mother in the present tense, although locals assure Sarah that she died in a car crash a long time ago. This intrigues Sarah even more. She discovers a pair of Julie’s knickers lying next to the pool and takes them up to her room. Later, she enters Julie’s room and steals her diary, copying Julie’s personal history into her laptop. Dorwell On Holiday is forgotten, and Sarah has started writing a quite different book

One evening, Julie comes home with Franck, the waiter at the local bar where Sarah has been regularly eating at lunchtimes. Sarah and Franck had struck up some sort of understanding, and the atmosphere is awkward. As the evening continues, we sense that it’s really three which is the loneliest number, as Franck dances first with Julie, then with Sarah, before Sarah retires to bed, and Julie takes Franck to the swimming pool where they skinny dip and she gives him a blow job.

Some of the reviews I’ve read have been over-salacious, in part a response to the film’s tagline: “Dive into this summer’s sexiest mystery!” A large proportion of some reviews looks for how many different ways the reviewer can say “Phwoar! Ludivine Sagnier, eh lads?” And if you are a pervy man who wants to watch a camera lingering on someone’s tits, this may well be the film for you, but it really doesn’t help us to learn whether it is Any Good to read your endless wank fantasies.

Fortunately, there is more to Swimming Pool than this, even though I think some of the film’s fans see some depth there that evaded me. Sagnier and Charlotte Rampling are excellent actors, and Ozon is able to generate a deep sense of unease in an audience who feel that something is going to happen, even if it rarely does. There is even a “twist ending”, which doesn’t really add anything to our understanding of the film, and is too pleased with itself to provide a satisfactory conclusion.

Swimming Pool presents itself as a “gay film” (it was shown this evening as part of the MonGay series of LGBTQ films), but is it? Is it really? While she might hold a submerged attraction for Julie, Sarah is straight throughout, and Julie’s attempt to sleep her way through all the men in Southern France shows that she is, at best bisexual. Unless I’m missing something, you never discern any real attraction between the 2 women. They just hate each other a little less as the film goes on.

I read a film by one critic who spends the whole review smugly saying that most people will need to watch Swimming Pool several times before the get the twist that he (and only he?) worked out. Although the review starts by warning of spoilers, the critic did not deign to explain his earth-shattering insight. This is a film for critics like him – it’s a little too full of itself and less clever than it thinks it is. It does look very pretty, though.