When I went to Jen and Christoph’s Thursday evening I had been asked to bring along four movies — Swimming Pool, The Dreamlife of Angels, The Woodsman, and Quills — from which we would likely choose something to watch.
Christoph immediately started flipping through his DVDs, Jen later returned, interrupted and said, no, we’re picking from Steve’s, and so it was that we ended up watching Swimming Pool, but not before Quills had been chosen and even put in the DVD player. But since I had already seen it — though I would have been willing to watch it again, hell, it has Geoffrey Rush and Kate Winslet! — we ended up with our English-French feature.
Swimming Pool is (or was?) a “serious” picture in a way, a drama, part mystery, part romance, but it plays with cliches … less charitable types might say that it participates or traffics in them. But it is a movie about a writer — Charlotte Rampling — who produces a popular series of detective fiction but who is suffering some sort of writer’s block, and so goes to her publisher’s French summer home, where, it seems, she meets his French daughter, not to be confused with the child (or children?) from his English marriage. From this encounter in the south of France between a stiff and uptight British writer and a libertine French teen springs not only personal conflict but the seeds of creativity for our protagonist, who quickly enough finds her authorial voice and sets about penning her newest novel.
All fine and dandy, but we shouldn’t take everything at face value. The constant shots of mirrors and windows are a formalist trick of sorts, perhaps just the director’s trademark, but they seem key, for the former filter and distort while at the same time serving as metaphorical entries to the soul, while the latter likewise distort or alter even when they reflect — not something new, but that which stares into them. And is not the flickering water of a swimming pool something quite similar?
Writers are implored to write about what they know, but late in the film the reverse is taken as gospel, that what is written about the writer knows and can be applied to the “real life” of the movie itself.
That aside much of the movie is populated with the mundane and even banal — but in detail, often meticulous — the types of things that in a mystery would be clues or hints but which otherwise structure a calming reality by way of repetition and familiarity. And yet the actions of the characters are just foreign or peculiar and the dialog sparse enough to spark viewer commentary during the viewing.
Because others had missed out on Quills it was entertaining to make connections between themes or actors in the movie to other works, including the ones we hadn’t.
This time, though, the joke is on us. “Swimming Pool,” Mr. Ozon’s first English-language film (with a bit of French thrown in for local color), is simultaneously a thoroughly mannered, mischievously artificial confection and an acute piece of psychological realism. Whose psychology, and which reality, remains ambiguous even after the tart, delicious final twist. After that, the story itself seems to evaporate like the mist over the pool’s luminous blue surface. The movie is alluringly insubstantial, like the light and air of the Luberon. You can’t hold onto it, but it lingers in your senses and plays tricks with your memory.
Reviews:
- Roger Ebert
- A.O. Scott (NY Times)
- Stephanie Zacharek (Salon)
- Keith Phipps (The Onion A.V. Club)
So it was that Charles Dance, who plays John the publisher, was also in Alien 3, but he was likewise in Nicholas Nickleby, where he met (I believe) Sophia Myles, with whom he then had a relationship. Sophia Myles had a small part in Underworld (and the sequel), but was in an episode of Doctor Who that I watched this evening. She began dating David Tennant, the newest Doctor Who, and he took over from Christopher Eccleston, who has recently been on Heroes, which stars Greg Grunberg, who was previously in Alias. Alias featured Victor Garber, who also played a role in Titanic, which starred Kate Winslet, and Kate Winslet stars with Geoffrey Rush in Quills. Of course this is just a variation on “Six Degrees of Separation” and there were many other sorts of connections of equally meaninglessness.
To conclude, upcoming baking projects:
- Battenberg Cake (or also: via Gastronomy Domine), inspired by Jasper Fforde’s Something Rotten)
- Rye Bread or perhaps pumpernickel; I just need the right recipe
- Strawberry-Rhubarb pie (probably about 2 cups of rhubarb and 1 of strawberries plus a crapload of sugar)
