July
2, 2003, 10:10 a.m. Fear
in a French Summer
Seen
Swimming.
e
would appreciate your not revealing the film's secrets," implores
the press kit for Swimming
Pool, the new movie-and the first in English — by acclaimed
French director François Ozon. This leads one to expect spectacular
plot twists of the kind that are prevalent, yet rarely convincing, in
American suspense movies; but what Swimming Pool offers, overall,
is not plot zigzags but a sustained atmosphere of fear, a journey of utterly
believable eeriness.
Charlotte Rampling-breathtakingly
beautiful at 58-plays British mystery writer Sarah Morton, depressed about
her work and her life. She takes up her publisher's offer of a vacation
at his mansion in the French countryside; he won't be there himself, so
she will have peace and quiet for her work. But shortly after Sarah arrives,
she is joined by a surprise visitor: the publisher's loud and slutty French
daughter, Julie (Ludivine Sagnier).
The exteriors in this film are every bit as gorgeous and idyllic as they
were in another impressive movie about a person trying to write a book
in picturesque isolation: Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. And while
Swimming Pool doesn't offer the explicitly bloody terror of Kubrick's
masterpiece, it does capture pretty much the same feeling: the worry that
one is either the object of a horrible conspiracy or-worse-going mad.
Rampling is equally capable of playing frumpy and sexy, warmly vulnerable
and harshly practical; she is therefore perfect for this part. The viewer
shares — to a level rarely achieved-in the emotional suspense endured
by the film's protagonist. She has written suspense novels; we have seen
suspense movies. We are savvy about the twist possibilities, but we get
the sense that our main character is, too.
This is a film whose payoff does not come at the end, though there are,
naturally, surprises of a kind in the denouement. It is, rather, a journey
to be enjoyed equally at all points along the way, a beautiful windswept
French summer with all the beauty of tenderness and dread.
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e
would appreciate your not revealing the film's secrets," implores
the press kit for 
