Think of Francois Ozon's astringent "Swimming Pool" as a novel by Georges Simenon set in a painting by David Hockney.
It's one of those intimate French dramas of psychological manipulation and murder. And a pool, shimmering incandescently, its microcurrents wavering in the light, its coolness eternally beckoning, is the central architectural feature of the setting and the central metaphor of the mind in question.
Fire and ice: Ludivine Sagnier, left, and Charlotte Rampling in Francois Ozon's astringent psychological study.
(Focus Features)
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That mind belongs to the mystery writer Sarah Morton, played by the brilliant Charlotte Rampling. It's not a happy mind, because, like a swimming pool in winter, it's empty. Our first look at Morton tells the tale: A scrawny, snarly woman, sunk into herself under a self-generating black cloud, she's chronically bitter, short-tempered, anguished and annoying. In short, a writer in search of a plot. She's in real trouble: She has a main character -- a Scotland Yard inspector -- she loathes but is afraid to abandon. It's like a bad marriage, only far worse.
Storming grumpily around London and her publisher's office, she's at last convinced by him -- Charles Dance, handsome, oleaginous -- that she needs to get away from it all if she's to come up with a new book. He offers her a stay at his farmhouse in the South of France where there's everything a blocked writer might need: solitude, beauty, a swimming pool, great food, a chance to recharge the imagination's batteries. He mumbles something about a daughter, but of course the writer's too bristly to pay much attention.
Thus the movie: Sarah, alone in the beautiful (but not luxurious; I loved the authentic touches of the old ratty furniture) farmhouse, finding at last some peace . . . until Julie shows up. The daughter.
One look at Julie's peeled fingernail polish and we know she's trouble looking for a place to happen. Julie -- the young French actress Ludivine Sagnier is fabulous, a perfect sparring mate for the icy Rampling -- is voluptuous, lazy, cruel, a little wanton and highly sexualized. She picks up on things a little too quickly for an 18-year-old: Sarah's repressed love for her father, for one thing. In fact, sexuality is everywhere in the air, in disturbing forms. Julie, young and beautiful, has a particularly off-putting habit of acquiring extremely unattractive older lovers. These are men whom Sarah would reject, too hairy or too bald, too old, too pitiful, too insipid; it enrages Sarah to see the youngster throwing her youth away on the lame, the halt and the hairless.
At first, the sparks fly as the writer's need for concentration clashes with the teenager's need for attention and validation. Plus, all the sex in the next room keeps you awake at night!
But gradually, Sarah finds herself fascinated by the young woman, and begins to investigate, exactly as her detective-character might. She looks into rumors of the accidental death of the mother, she tries to corner the father into some kind of admission by phone, but he stops accepting her calls.
The tension is never crushing, as it would be in an American job. Instead, it grows by increments, until you realize the movie, in its quiet way, has you snared entirely. And that's even before the first murder.
In some senses, "Swimming Pool" is a meditation on artistic creation: The pool itself strikes me as a useful symbol of the subconscious, that dark zone where forbidden thoughts move untrammeled by morality and the true work of writing takes place. When Julie swims, with the blue-green water gently kneading her dappled, perfect body, and the intense Sarah watching from the balcony, enraptured and provoked, you know something bad is going to happen. You just don't know what.
Swimming Pool (95 minutes, at the Cineplex Odeon Outer Circle and Landmark Bethesda Row) is rated R for sexuality and violence.
