Overall Rating
  Awesome: 26.5%
Worth A Look: 36.75%
Average: 8.55%
Pretty Bad: 20.51%
Total Crap: 7.69%
5 reviews, 87 user ratings
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| Swimming Pool |
by Robert Flaxman
"Drowns under its own pretensions."
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You’ve really got to hand it to François Ozon. Evidently, he realized that the film he was making had little to its name besides a whole bunch of gratuitous nudity. Surely, this alone was not going to make for a successful movie. So, Ozon did what he knew he had to do if this movie were going to become one of the most talked about of the year (as apparently it has) - he threw in a surprise ending that cast questions on the entire film that had preceded it.This is always good for a filmmaker, for two reasons. One, it gets people talking about the ending (they may end up saying, “What an awful ending,” but there’s always the hope that they’ll tell their friends, “You just have to see this one for the ending twist”), and thus about the film. Two, it prevents critics from complaining too much about the film. If the ending is tied in too much with the rest of the film, it’s hard to find things to complain about while not giving away the ending - and keeping endings secret, no matter how stupid, is a sacred reviewers’ tenet.
Thus, I will try not to discuss the end of Swimming Pool, but I will say this much right now: for a surprise ending - a device I am more often than not a fan of - the ending is really bad.
Fortunately for me, what precedes the ending is just as bad in its own way, mostly because nothing happens. In the 100 minutes prior to the ending, the following happens: Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling) is an author whose publisher suggests she take some time at his house in France to overcome her writer’s block. She does and it works, until the publisher’s free-spirited French daughter Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) shows up and starts walking around in various states of undress. Sarah is annoyed, but eventually she decides to write about Julie instead, and then Julie kills some guy for no reason and Sarah helps her cover it up.
I have no problem disclosing this last bit because it is in no way relevant to the plot. In fact, pretty much nothing that happens in Swimming Pool is relevant to the plot because there pretty much is no plot. “Author writes about one thing, then writes about something else” is not exactly riveting drama, and Swimming Pool basically unfolds as a series of loosely connected events that don’t mean much of anything when taken as a whole.
Of course, Ozon foresaw this line of detraction as well. At the end of the film, just before the terrible ending, Sarah hands her publisher her new novel. He doesn’t like it - he thinks it’s “too subtle.” Sarah expected this and announces she already signed with another publisher who loved it and they released it. The book is titled, in cloyingly meta-referential fashion, Swimming Pool. The message to critics is clear: if you didn’t like it, you must have been too uptight to get it.
What Ozon can’t escape is that there’s nothing to “get” about this movie. I think he wants to be like David Lynch or something; that would explain the nudity, and the gardener’s daughter, who is needlessly bizarre-looking, and the random shots that I guess are supposed to be dream sequences (but even for dream sequences, they mean next to nothing). Nothing in the rest of the movie justifies the pointlessness of these scenes. Ozon also starts several different plot strands, and just when you think, “Hey, this movie might be going somewhere,” he drops them abruptly and with no resolution at all.
The tagline on the poster I saw was “Dive into this summer’s sexiest mystery.” I can think of at least two things wrong with this tagline. First of all, the film isn’t sexy; if Showgirls left one imprint on Hollywood, it was the notion that too much nudity crossed the line from erotic to stultifying. And second, it’s not a mystery. There’s only one plot strand with any mystery to it, but it can’t be much of a mystery if Ozon doesn’t feel he needs to tell the audience the outcome, which he doesn’t.
Some people, as noted above, might recommend a movie like this on the basis of the ending. In fact, that was one of my prime motivations for seeing it, because, as I said, I usually like twist endings. But I’m not going to let you make the same mistake.Skip Swimming Pool. You’ll only end up feeling cheated.
 del.icio.us 
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=7810&reviewer=385
originally posted: 10/11/04 18:22:19
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OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2003 Edinburgh Film Festival. For more in the 2003 Edinburgh Film Festival series, click here.
OFFICIAL SELECTION: 2003 Sydney Film Festival. For more in the 2003 Sydney Film Festival series, click here.
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USA
02-Jul-2003 (R)
DVD: 13-Jan-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
02-Oct-2003
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