The blog of the newspaper El País has launched a new section: Summer Film Club , and it kicks off with a selection of three films featuring swimming pools. There are many films about swimming pools throughout cinematic history, but this selection shows how the pool can be a place of dreams, encounters, but also, heartache.
Here are the three films they recommend:
The swimming pool
Director: Jacques Deray. Screenplay: Jean Claude Carrière. Cast: Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet and Jane Birkin. France-Italy, 1969.
A blinding light in the sky and clear, blue waters lapping at the bottom. The sun-kissed body of a young, dark-haired man, lying dozing beside a pool. In the background, a deep green landscape. The heat of that summer is visible in the beads of sweat on his bare skin. A languid hand stirs the water in the pool. With these images begins the film *La Piscine* (The Swimming Pool), a film that blends thriller, drama, and love. More than love, perhaps, passion and eroticism. Perhaps the same passion that Alain Delon and Romy Schneider experienced for years in real life. At 34 and 31 years old respectively, and undeniably beautiful, Delon and Schneider, both then at the peak of their film careers, become the focus of this intense story, which today, almost 44 years after its release, can be viewed with absolute serenity.
The film tells the story of Jean-Paul and Marianne’s peaceful vacation at a villa near St. Tropez. Everything is going perfectly until Marianne invites her former lover Harry, an old friend of Jean-Paul’s, and his daughter Penelope to spend a few days at the house. Soon, tension begins to rise among the four, and beneath a veneer of cordiality, an atmosphere of jealousy and suspicion develops. Penelope, played by a very young and beautiful Jane Birkin, attracts Jean-Paul’s attention and the ire of the other two characters.
The images of the pool – “it’s the best thing about the house,” Jean-Paul tells Harry when he arrives, “there are many where everything is allowed, or almost” – with its love affairs, fights and even death, are the center of this film that was a great success in France and that premiered in Spain with some scenes cut.
Swimming pool
Director: François Ozon. Screenplay: François Ozon and Emmanuéle Bernheim. Performers: Charlotte Rampling, Ludivine Sagnier and Charles Dance. France / United Kingdom. 2003.
What is it about this young, brash girl that obsesses and shakes the composure and seriousness of a mature English writer struggling with writer’s block? A blend of fiction and reality (the truth is only revealed at the end), *Swimming Pool *, which retained its English title to avoid conflict with the Spanish title * La piscina *, tells the story of a successful English crime novelist (Charlotte Rampling, 58) who travels to France, to the Luberon region, to her publisher’s home in search of inspiration. One night, her publisher’s French daughter (Ludivine Sagnier, 24) arrives at the house and shatters the novelist’s peace.
Filmed in English and French, this film marks a departure for François Ozon (Paris, 1967), one of France’s most celebrated directors, from his more theatrical and artificial style to an intimate exploration of how inspiration strikes. How does it occur? When does it arrive? Does it move you? What is clear is that in Swimming Pool , the novelist, devoid of ideas, experiences a rebirth of inspiration with the initially disastrous arrival of a sensual and sexual young woman.
And once again, the swimming pool becomes another of the film’s main characters. It’s the meeting place for the two women. It’s a space of freedom and sexuality, a screen where everyone projects their inner demons.
Although the film lacks the freshness of some of Ozon’s other titles and can be somewhat tedious at times, it’s undeniably watchable. Charlotte Rampling won the Best Actress award at the European Film Awards for this role.
Secret games
Director: Todd Field. Starring: Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Connelly. United States, 2006.
The swimming pool appears rather late in the film, but it’s there that love and fear simmer. Directed by Stanley Kubrick’s collaborator Todd Field, and featuring a truly stellar cast, Little Children is a powerful and unsettling drama in which several people from a small, seemingly idyllic American town cross paths casually and dangerously in swimming pools and parks. Many stories populate the narrative of this film, reflecting the clash between a backward and fearful society and one seeking to break free from those chains.
The pool in Little Children (its original title) is not, as in the previous two films, a private place, but a large municipal swimming pool, overflowing with noisy children and hysterical mothers. It is in this corner that a bored mother (Kate Winslet) searches for her immature, still-student father (Patrick Wilson), and where a pedophile, recently released from prison, reappears, wearing his goggles and wearing athletic gear, ready to continue “admiring” the beardless bodies of boys and girls underwater.
Todd Field (California, United States, 1964), who began his acting career in Ruby in Paradise and continued with Eyes Wide Shut (Kubrick), is also the director of In the Room.
