Swimming Pool
Swimming Pool is a film that will either lull you in, or turn you right the fuck off, with some seriously tedious pacing that controls its first half. It plods along feeling at first like it has been solely created for old ladies, the Calender Girl market, but then it sharply contorts into an altogether different beast, completely changing form as it dares you to follow, wherever it may go.
We start off with a grumpy old prudish British crime writer who moves to her publisher's house in France because she has hit a creative drought. There she laps up the picturesque European surroundings and wantonly eyes of the foreign men like a Mary Moody biography, except without all the adultery and abandonment of her family type stuff. Did I say adultery and abandonment? I meant freedom and empowerment, of course! You go girl! Never has being a stupid old slag sounded so romantic (if you can't tell - I fucking hate Mary Moody)!
But back to our British writer. Her serene inspiring environment is one day shattered when her publisher's sexually promiscuous young daughter comes crashing into the house with plans to stay for a while. The dynamic has shifted for the first time. They're the original odd-couple! One is dirty and carefree, the other clean and fastidious! One keeps walking around topless and getting carnal with strange old men while the other is obviously sexually repressed! One is old, the other young! This war goes on for a while, but underneath the frivolity the film is again slyly changing, as the writer becomes increasingly fascinated by the girl – almost to the point of obsession. She starts watching her sexual dalliances, stealing her underwear, and with a muse to inspire her, starts writing again…about her.
The girl finds out and extracts her revenge. She brings home a local man the writer had shown a fancy to, intent on seducing him in front of her. And then the film changes again. The girl proves to be seriously unstable and the Frenchman mysteriously disappears. Now the writer has to use all her knowledge of crime to uncover the truth about what happened that night by the swimming pool.
So you see what's happening here: it's like she is in one of her own novels! Has her rabid imagination manifested her predicament into her new bestseller? Or has she really just become an accomplice to murder?
I am not in the camp that claims Swimming Pool as brilliant, but I did enjoy it. Even the Mary Moody plodding start has an intriguing air about it that kept me watching, and the film expertly handles the shifts in tone to great effect. Thematically there's shit going on, which is kind of interesting if you want to think about it. The promiscuous young girl may have been a manifestation of her own longing for her lost youth blah blah blah – but basically this is a film about a writer interacting with the characters she creates – and obviously any such characters are a part of he or she who creates them. It is an examination of the writing process.
Unfortunately all of this doesn't exactly get tied together in a satisfying way. The underlying themes of the film should have sufficed, and the film's true meaning should have been left up to the viewer, without a final reveal that tries to make you go either “Ohhhhhh”, or “Huh?” If you got what was going on, then you didn't need it, and if you didn't get it, then it still doesn't piece everything together all that nicely.
If people think they've just watched a basic murder-mystery, then so be it. That the filmmakers bother in trying to spell their grander plan out actually feels a bit narcissistic – "Look at us, we're so smart! There was more to this than meets the eye!"
There is, of course, but they didn't have to gloat about it.