THE SWIMMING POOL (1969) ★ ★ ★ ★



Some films are the full package, delivering style and substance in equal measure. Others are more style than substance, and that can be fatal to a movie, but not always - good films tend to be more atmospheric than television shows, for the simple reason that time is against them. It's much harder to connect with audiences in 120 minutes than it is in 120 hours. To achieve maximal effect, directors turn to the most basic device in their creative arsenal: imagery. 

In "The Swimming Pool," which is now part of the Criterion Collection, director Jacques Deray ("Three Men to Kill," "He Died With His Eyes Open") makes up for his thin screenplay by focusing less on the actors' lines, and more on the silences between them. His film is exemplary of style over substance. It doesn't hurt that its stars are Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, two beautiful people who could easily captivate audiences without saying a word. Adding a 21 year-old Jane Birkin (of Birkin bag fame) doesn't hurt, either. The picture is loaded to the swim fins with sex appeal. 

But it's the imagery in "The Swimming Pool" that really drives the story, and made it difficult for me to take my eyes off the screen. I've seen this film at least three times, and plan on seeing it at least three more, simply because it's so much fun to look at. Deray's tale is an uncomplicated murder "thriller," in which a young couple holiday alone at a French villa. Marianne (Schneider) and Jean-Paul (Delon) lounge around in bed and in the pool, occasionally engaging in mildly kinky sex, and doing what French people do best in French movies, like smoke a lot of French cigarettes, and peer longingly out open French windows. 

Marianne's ex, a rich record producer named Harry, played as a bit of a cad by Maurice Ronet, visits with his daughter Penelope (Birkin), and naturally four people in an enclosed villa is more interesting than two. Harry flirts with Marianne, and chides Jean-Paul for his life choices, creating sexual tension that pulls the couple apart, and Jean-Paul closer to Penelope. Birkin's character serves in the story as the fulcrum on which the motive to kill rests, and she plays the part with an underrated performance that should have made her a bigger star than she was. Penelope is so manipulatively shrewd that viewers would be forgiven for wondering if she's the film's true villain. After some alone time with her, Jean-Paul's patience with Harry reaches its breaking point, and the seething coils of disgust that the men feel for each other spring loose and start killing. But how do you get away with murder in such close quarters? 

The pacing of the film is slow at times, and I'm certain it could've been trimmed by twenty or thirty minutes. Still, cinematographer Jean-Jacques Tarbès' leisurely images of Delon's tan body floating in indigo waters, and then in Schneider's arms, are sights to behold, as are those of Birkin staring dreamily into space, her lithe body draping itself over everything. In one scene, Ronet's 1968 Maserati Ghibli snakes through country roads, looking great but with no clear destination, much like the plot. Yet the rich film grain and striking colors of "The Swimming Pool" create a dream-like sense of a lazily unfolding narrative. It feels good to go with this flow. 

Deray's themes of sexual decadence aren't addressed in conversation, but in the gestures of the actors' bodies as they engage with each other. His depiction of a seemingly spontaneous murder is eerily foreshadowed in the chiseled lines of Delon's face long before Harry even pays his visit. After the crime, the pedestrian trope of the "visiting inspector" is mercifully minimal. In the final scene, when Marianne tells her former flame that she's leaving the villa without him, he grabs her by the shoulders and looks into her eyes. The protracted gaze they share reveals an unspoken truth between men and women. Then they gaze together from a window. Credits roll. A French film has just penetrated your soul. 

                                                                                                                                 --- Bill Fontaine


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