Jacques Deray – 1969 –
France
A big hit in France, The Swimming
Pool stakes out a middle-ground between sexy, picturesque melodrama and
influential European art-house favorites of the time like Bergman’s Persona (1966) and Godard’s Weekend (1967). It doesn’t achieve anything substantial as a
result of this fusion, however, but it is an involving movie to watch on a
purely superficial level, what with its gorgeous locations in the French
Riviera and its equally beautiful cast including former real-life couple Romy
Schneider and Alain Delon, plus a very young and wistful Jane Birkin. Delon plays a writer who is vacationing with
his wife in a friend’s villa near the sea, where they spend their days
luxuriating around the pool and making love.
When a past lover of Schneider’s shows up with his teenage daughter
(Birkin), the stage is set for a cat-and-mouse game of seduction and eventually
murder. Since the film is a fairly
unsubtle pastiche of previous movies that had made Delon such a huge star, such
as Purple Noon (1960) and Joy House (1964), I could have done with
less turgid intrigue and more shameless eye-candy. I would have been satisfied with a string of
loosely connected scenes of Delon, Schneider and Birkin swimming and sauntering
around Mediterranean beaches and seducing each other. The thriller aspects are extremely worn and
since they lack any existential subtext, aren’t very thought-provoking or
suspenseful. It was during the shooting
of this film that Delon’s former bodyguard turned up dead, which sparked a
massive scandal involving Delon, his shady underworld acquaintances and the
French government.
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