Swimming Pool is a 2003 French-English psychological thriller and mystery film, directed by François Ozon and starring Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier. The plot focuses on a British crime novelist, Sarah Morton (Rampling) who travels to her publisher's upscale summer house in Southern France for solitude to work on her next book. However, the arrival of Julie (Sagnier), the publisher's daughter, induces complications and a subsequent crime.
While the film's protagonist is British and both of the lead characters are bilingual, the majority of the story takes place in France - thus, the dialogue throughout the film is a mixture of French and English, which is appropriately subtitled.
Swimming Pool premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2003,[1] and was released in France a few days later. It was given a limited release in the United States that July, and was edited in order to avoid an NC-17 rating due to its sexual content and nudity.
The film also ignited controversy with audiences over its ambiguous nature and unclear conclusion which can be interpreted and argued in various ways.
Plot summary
Sarah Morton (Rampling), a middle-aged English mystery author, who has written a successful series of novels featuring a single detective, is having writer's block that is impeding her next book.
Sarah's publisher, John Bosload (Dance), offers her his country house near Lacoste, France for some rest and relaxation. After becoming comfortable with the run of the house, Sarah's quietude is disrupted by a young woman claiming to be the publisher's daughter, Julie (Sagnier). She shows up one night claiming to be taking time off from work herself. She also claims that her mother used to be Bosload's mistress, but that he would not leave his family.
Julie's sex life consists of one-night stands with various oafish men, and a competition of personalities develops between the two women. At first Sarah regards Julie as a distraction from her writing. She uses earplugs to allow her to sleep during Julie's noisy nighttime adventures, although she nonetheless has a voyeuristic fascination with them. Later she abandons the earplugs during one of Julie's trysts, beginning to envy Julie's lifestyle. The competition comes to the fore when a local waiter, Franck (Jean-Marie Lamour), is involved. Julie wants him but he appears to prefer the more mature Sarah, having struck up a relationship with her during her frequent lunches at the bistro.
Ludivine Sagnier stars as the promiscuous and mysterious Julie in
Swimming Pool.
An unexpected tragedy occurs after a night of flirting between the three. After swimming together in the pool, Franck refuses to allow Julie to continue performing oral sex on him, once Sarah, who watches them from the balcony, throws a rock into the water. Franck feels frightened and tells Julie he is leaving. The next day, Franck is missing.
While investigating Franck's disappearance, Sarah learns that Julie's mother has been dead for some time, though Julie had claimed that she was still alive. She returns to the villa, where a confused Julie thinks that Sarah is her mother, and has a breakdown. She eventually recovers, and confesses that Franck is dead. Julie repeatedly hit him over the head with a rock as he tried to leave her at the pool. His body is in one of the sheds.
Sarah suddenly becomes the young girl's friend and protector, and assists in helping her to bury Franck's body. The relationship between the two changes and they appear to have become friends.
When Marcel (Marc Fayolle) becomes suspicious of the mound of fresh soil where the body is buried, Sarah seduces the elderly gardener in a way that Julie would seduce him.
Julie leaves, thanking Sarah for her help and leaving her the manuscript of an unpublished novel written by her late mother, which she had previously claimed that John made her burn.
Sarah returns to England and visits her publisher's office with her new novel. His daughter also shows up just as Sarah is leaving. However, the girl in England is a different person from the woman that Sarah lived with in France. Her name is Julia, not Julie, and she barely acknowledges Sarah when they pass each other in John's office. Sarah has flashbacks of scenes at the villa where it is Julia and not Julie who is sharing the house, a disparity for which no explicit explanation is given.
Cast
Ending interpretations
The intentionally ambiguous ending sparked much controversy with audiences. One suspicion is that Sarah had been alone at the villa for the entire time. Ostensibly this would mean that the character of Julie is a total fiction conjured by Sarah for the purpose of her new book - also titled Swimming Pool - which she presents defiantly to Bosload at the end of the film. This explanation chimes succinctly with the character role of Sarah and what we know to be the reason for her trip to the villa. We learn early in the film that Sarah is in need of both inspiration and a new direction for her writing. The real experience of visiting her publisher's villa becomes the backdrop for a fictional narrative driven by the compelling character of Julie. Ozon himself has stated:
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Charlotte's (Rampling's) character kept mixing fantasy and reality. Although in Swimming Pool, everything related to fantasy is part of the act of creation, so it is more channeled and less likely to end up causing madness. In terms of directing, I've treated everything that is imaginary in Swimming Pool in a realistic way so that you see it all - fantasy and reality alike - on the same plane." [2] |
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A competing interpretation of the end of the film puts forth the idea that Sarah has been thinking and writing about herself all along, and that Julie is simply a creation based on her younger self. Sarah has been reliving her long ago past in the persona of Julie. At the end of the film, it's obvious that Julie isn't (and hasn't been) Bosload's daughter throughout the film. In fact, when all three women, Sarah, Julie, and Julia, alternately wave to each other across the swimming pool, we can briefly see an emotionally immature Sarah (perhaps thinking of her youth). This suggests a deeper connection between the trio.
Reception
The film was well received and earned an 85 percent "freshness" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with most critics' praise centering on the two leads. It grossed $10,130,108 in the United States and $12,311,215 in the rest of the world for a total of $22,441,323.[3] It had a budget of €6.1 million (approximately US$7.8 million), meaning that it was a financial success.[4]
Roger Ebert gave the film a positive review and stated that "Francois Ozon, the director and co-writer (with Emmanuele Bernheim), understands as Hitchcock did the small steps by which a wrong decision grows in its wrongness into a terrifying paranoid nightmare."[5] Neil Smith of BBC also praised the film, calling it a "compelling psychological melodrama" and "Hitchockian thriller".[6]
References
External links
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