A couple (Alain Delon and Romy Schneider) spending time at a country villa find their idyll complicated by the arrival of an old friend (Maurice Ronet) and his 18-year-old daughter (Jane Birkin).
I caught La Piscine after a good lunch and started to power down about halfway into the piece - this was around the point that Penelope (Birkin) and Jean-Paul (Delon) start to get closer.
I thought I had fallen asleep.
When I came to, the characters were leaving dinner, and the central couple had resolved to break up, with the understanding that Jean-Paul will pursue his friend’s daughter.
I thought I had missed a scene, and spent the rest of the movie trying to figure out if Jean-Paul had seduced Penelope.
I went back and checked - I had not missed anything. My slight doze had only aided the film’s obliqueness.
My local Arthouse has been running a themed series based around swimming pools. This is how I got to see The Swimmer.
A good-looking movie set in gorgeous locations starring beautiful people lusting and loathing after each other, La Piscine is a good time.
It is the less plot-driven, more subtle version of a Hollywood erotic thriller - with a focus on guilt and paranoia over eroticism.
With its focus on a couple reckoning with knowledge of a crime, it is somewhat reminiscent of Claude Chabrol’s Le Boucher, released the following year - although far less interesting than that effort.
The most fascinating element of the film is the way it builds tension - from the beginning, there is a focus on lingering glances and micro-gestures. Everyone aside from Penelope is constantly surveilling.
To the film’s credit, it manages to conjure a lot of paranoia without resorting to flashbacks or long-winded exposition.
The key to the film’s success is Alain Delon is the sphynx-like Jean-Paul, and Romy Schneider as his increasingly suspicious girlfriend, Marianne.
The building paranoia around Jean-Paul is partially down to Schneider, who manages to create a sense of Marianne’s duelling senses of rapture and self-awareness. Hers is a quiet pressure cooker of a performance that adds to the film’s mounting sense of dread.
Delon, one of the major French movie stars of the middle twentieth century, is a human special effect.
From memory I have seen him in Purple Noon and La Samourai, movies which make use of his catlike stillness and opacity.
Unlike those movies, La Piscine strips away that obliqueness - Jean-Paul is revealed as a hollow man, someone who represents nothing except the illusion of something more profound.
That kind of sums up my feelings about the movie. I left it intrigued but slightly underwhelmed.
The film is more successful in its first half, as it sets the table for the Cold War between its three leads. Once a murder takes place, the film begins to feel far more familiar.
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