Sarah Morton, a middle-aged English writer specialising in detective novels, goes to stay in a country villa in France owned by John Bosload, her publisher, in order to work on her new book. One day Sarah is surprised to find a young woman in the property and, assuming that she is a trespasser, asks her indignantly what she is doing in the house. The girl, Julie, explains that she is John's daughter, and that her father has given her permission to use the house. Sarah and Julie begin to live together in the house, but theirs turns out to be an uneasy relationship because of their very different lifestyles. Sarah is looking for peace and solitude to concentrate on her writing, but her life is constantly disrupted by the brash, noisy Julie who brings a succession of lovers back to the house.
At first the film seems to be developing into a comedy of manners (or perhaps a comedy of bad manners) based around the contrast between a stereotypically sexually and emotionally repressed English spinster and a stereotypically sexually uninhibited French girl. (Julie is half-English but has a French mother, one of John's former mistresses, and has lived all her life in France; she speaks English with a heavy accent). Sarah is disgusted and, at the same time, secretly fascinated by Julie's irregular sex-life. There is even a hint of a lesbian attraction towards the younger woman; it is notable that whenever Sarah is looking at Julie the camera seems to zoom in lovingly on Ludivine Sagnier's generally scantily-clad body.
And then, suddenly, the film takes a sinister turn and becomes not a comedy but a sort of mystery thriller. Franck, a waiter in a local café and one of Julie's many boyfriends, disappears, and Sarah suspects not only that he may have been killed but also that Julie may be responsible.
In his review of the film Roger Ebert stated that "François Ozon (the director and co-writer) understands as Hitchcock did the small steps by which a wrong decision grows in its wrongness into a terrifying paranoid nightmare". He was not the only critic to draw a comparison with Hitchcock, but I wonder if such critics actually saw the same film as I did. To begin with, it is normally random chance which plunges Hitchcock's heroes and heroines into a terrifying nightmare, without the need for any wrong decision on their part. (Think of Roger Thornhill in "North by North-West" or the married couples in the two versions of "The Man who Knew Too Much"). Ebert may have been thinking of Marion Crane in "Psycho", who does indeed find herself in a nightmare as a direct result of stealing from her employer, but she is not really typical of Hitchcock's characters. Secondly, in "Swimming Pool" the "nightmare" arrives suddenly out of the blue rather than by small steps. In a matter of minutes Julie goes straight from performing a sex act on Franck to battering him to death with a rock, without any motive ever being given. The only possible explanation is that Julie is mentally deranged, but even if one accepts this explanation one still has to explain why Sarah should help an insane murderer to dispose of the body and to cover up her crime.
The ending of the film has been described as "ambiguous". It has been suggested that Sarah has been alone at the villa all the time and that Julie, Franck and some of the other characters only exist in her imagination as characters in the novel she is working on. Now I am well aware that the idea of a work of fiction supposedly created by an author who is himself or herself a character in a larger work of fiction is a variety of what has become known as "metafiction" and is one of the games which authors sometimes play with their readers. This game, moreover, can be a very effective literary advice; something similar occurs in Ian McEwan's novel "Atonement", and I have great admiration both for that novel and for the film which Joe Wright made of it. The concept of "metafiction", however, does not serve to turn a bad plot into a good one, and the plot of "Swimming Pool", whether one regards it as having been created by the real Francois Ozon or the fictional Sarah Mason, is a pretty poor one with more holes than a colander. Moreover, when I was watching the film myself it never occurred to me that Ozon might be playing metafictional games; I assumed that we were supposed to take everything that happened at the villa at face value.
The titular swimming pool, which plays a part in the story, and the theme of two women trying to dispose of the body of one man, may have been intended by Ozon as a reference to Clouzot's "Les Diaboliques", but his film cannot bear comparison with that masterpiece of the French cinema. Nor, pace Mr Ebert, can it bear comparison with "Psycho" or Hitchcock's other classics. Even the Master's weaker movies ("Stage Fright", "Torn Curtain", etc.) were normally more coherent than this. In terms of quality about the only Hitchcock film I would compare it to would be something like "Jamaica Inn", but then I have always considered that to be Hitch's worst film. It would have got a lower mark but for a decent acting contribution from Charlotte Rampling. 4/10
At first the film seems to be developing into a comedy of manners (or perhaps a comedy of bad manners) based around the contrast between a stereotypically sexually and emotionally repressed English spinster and a stereotypically sexually uninhibited French girl. (Julie is half-English but has a French mother, one of John's former mistresses, and has lived all her life in France; she speaks English with a heavy accent). Sarah is disgusted and, at the same time, secretly fascinated by Julie's irregular sex-life. There is even a hint of a lesbian attraction towards the younger woman; it is notable that whenever Sarah is looking at Julie the camera seems to zoom in lovingly on Ludivine Sagnier's generally scantily-clad body.
And then, suddenly, the film takes a sinister turn and becomes not a comedy but a sort of mystery thriller. Franck, a waiter in a local café and one of Julie's many boyfriends, disappears, and Sarah suspects not only that he may have been killed but also that Julie may be responsible.
In his review of the film Roger Ebert stated that "François Ozon (the director and co-writer) understands as Hitchcock did the small steps by which a wrong decision grows in its wrongness into a terrifying paranoid nightmare". He was not the only critic to draw a comparison with Hitchcock, but I wonder if such critics actually saw the same film as I did. To begin with, it is normally random chance which plunges Hitchcock's heroes and heroines into a terrifying nightmare, without the need for any wrong decision on their part. (Think of Roger Thornhill in "North by North-West" or the married couples in the two versions of "The Man who Knew Too Much"). Ebert may have been thinking of Marion Crane in "Psycho", who does indeed find herself in a nightmare as a direct result of stealing from her employer, but she is not really typical of Hitchcock's characters. Secondly, in "Swimming Pool" the "nightmare" arrives suddenly out of the blue rather than by small steps. In a matter of minutes Julie goes straight from performing a sex act on Franck to battering him to death with a rock, without any motive ever being given. The only possible explanation is that Julie is mentally deranged, but even if one accepts this explanation one still has to explain why Sarah should help an insane murderer to dispose of the body and to cover up her crime.
The ending of the film has been described as "ambiguous". It has been suggested that Sarah has been alone at the villa all the time and that Julie, Franck and some of the other characters only exist in her imagination as characters in the novel she is working on. Now I am well aware that the idea of a work of fiction supposedly created by an author who is himself or herself a character in a larger work of fiction is a variety of what has become known as "metafiction" and is one of the games which authors sometimes play with their readers. This game, moreover, can be a very effective literary advice; something similar occurs in Ian McEwan's novel "Atonement", and I have great admiration both for that novel and for the film which Joe Wright made of it. The concept of "metafiction", however, does not serve to turn a bad plot into a good one, and the plot of "Swimming Pool", whether one regards it as having been created by the real Francois Ozon or the fictional Sarah Mason, is a pretty poor one with more holes than a colander. Moreover, when I was watching the film myself it never occurred to me that Ozon might be playing metafictional games; I assumed that we were supposed to take everything that happened at the villa at face value.
The titular swimming pool, which plays a part in the story, and the theme of two women trying to dispose of the body of one man, may have been intended by Ozon as a reference to Clouzot's "Les Diaboliques", but his film cannot bear comparison with that masterpiece of the French cinema. Nor, pace Mr Ebert, can it bear comparison with "Psycho" or Hitchcock's other classics. Even the Master's weaker movies ("Stage Fright", "Torn Curtain", etc.) were normally more coherent than this. In terms of quality about the only Hitchcock film I would compare it to would be something like "Jamaica Inn", but then I have always considered that to be Hitch's worst film. It would have got a lower mark but for a decent acting contribution from Charlotte Rampling. 4/10