InspireGato Film Perfection

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

Ella-May O'Brien Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Isbel A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The Couchpotatoes Before watching Swimming Pool I had in mind that I was going to watch a mystery thriller so in the end I was a bit disappointed because even though there is that vague mystery feeling floating during the movie it's only in the last twenty minutes that something is really happening and to me it could have come much sooner. The rest of the story was just too slow and not entertaining enough to me. Watching a grumpy Charlotte Rampling, like most of her roles, being jealous of a young nymphomaniac French girl is only good for about twenty minutes, after that I'm getting bored. The acting wasn't bad, but the story wasn't good enough to be remembered, at least not to me.

James Hitchcock Sarah Morton, a middle-aged English writer specialising in detective novels, goes to stay in a country villa in France owned by John Bosload, her publisher, in order to work on her new book. One day Sarah is surprised to find a young woman in the property and, assuming that she is a trespasser, asks her indignantly what she is doing in the house. The girl, Julie, explains that she is John's daughter, and that her father has given her permission to use the house. Sarah and Julie begin to live together in the house, but theirs turns out to be an uneasy relationship because of their very different lifestyles. Sarah is looking for peace and solitude to concentrate on her writing, but her life is constantly disrupted by the brash, noisy Julie who brings a succession of lovers back to the house.At first the film seems to be developing into a comedy of manners (or perhaps a comedy of bad manners) based around the contrast between a stereotypically sexually and emotionally repressed English spinster and a stereotypically sexually uninhibited French girl. (Julie is half-English but has a French mother, one of John's former mistresses, and has lived all her life in France; she speaks English with a heavy accent). Sarah is disgusted and, at the same time, secretly fascinated by Julie's irregular sex-life. There is even a hint of a lesbian attraction towards the younger woman; it is notable that whenever Sarah is looking at Julie the camera seems to zoom in lovingly on Ludivine Sagnier's generally scantily-clad body.And then, suddenly, the film takes a sinister turn and becomes not a comedy but a sort of mystery thriller. Franck, a waiter in a local café and one of Julie's many boyfriends, disappears, and Sarah suspects not only that he may have been killed but also that Julie may be responsible.In his review of the film Roger Ebert stated that "François Ozon (the director and co-writer) understands as Hitchcock did the small steps by which a wrong decision grows in its wrongness into a terrifying paranoid nightmare". He was not the only critic to draw a comparison with Hitchcock, but I wonder if such critics actually saw the same film as I did. To begin with, it is normally random chance which plunges Hitchcock's heroes and heroines into a terrifying nightmare, without the need for any wrong decision on their part. (Think of Roger Thornhill in "North by North-West" or the married couples in the two versions of "The Man who Knew Too Much"). Ebert may have been thinking of Marion Crane in "Psycho", who does indeed find herself in a nightmare as a direct result of stealing from her employer, but she is not really typical of Hitchcock's characters. Secondly, in "Swimming Pool" the "nightmare" arrives suddenly out of the blue rather than by small steps. In a matter of minutes Julie goes straight from performing a sex act on Franck to battering him to death with a rock, without any motive ever being given. The only possible explanation is that Julie is mentally deranged, but even if one accepts this explanation one still has to explain why Sarah should help an insane murderer to dispose of the body and to cover up her crime.The ending of the film has been described as "ambiguous". It has been suggested that Sarah has been alone at the villa all the time and that Julie, Franck and some of the other characters only exist in her imagination as characters in the novel she is working on. Now I am well aware that the idea of a work of fiction supposedly created by an author who is himself or herself a character in a larger work of fiction is a variety of what has become known as "metafiction" and is one of the games which authors sometimes play with their readers. This game, moreover, can be a very effective literary advice; something similar occurs in Ian McEwan's novel "Atonement", and I have great admiration both for that novel and for the film which Joe Wright made of it. The concept of "metafiction", however, does not serve to turn a bad plot into a good one, and the plot of "Swimming Pool", whether one regards it as having been created by the real Francois Ozon or the fictional Sarah Mason, is a pretty poor one with more holes than a colander. Moreover, when I was watching the film myself it never occurred to me that Ozon might be playing metafictional games; I assumed that we were supposed to take everything that happened at the villa at face value.The titular swimming pool, which plays a part in the story, and the theme of two women trying to dispose of the body of one man, may have been intended by Ozon as a reference to Clouzot's "Les Diaboliques", but his film cannot bear comparison with that masterpiece of the French cinema. Nor, pace Mr Ebert, can it bear comparison with "Psycho" or Hitchcock's other classics. Even the Master's weaker movies ("Stage Fright", "Torn Curtain", etc.) were normally more coherent than this. In terms of quality about the only Hitchcock film I would compare it to would be something like "Jamaica Inn", but then I have always considered that to be Hitch's worst film. It would have got a lower mark but for a decent acting contribution from Charlotte Rampling. 4/10

whatdoes1know The plot in a giant SPOILER: A female London-based mystery novel writer spending a summer at her publisher's villa in France helps a young woman (Julie) claiming to be the publisher's daughter get rid of evidence of her murder of a local young man interested in both ladies. The writer ends up writing a book based on this girl and a book by her mother based on her romantic relationship with the publisher, and publishes it behind his back. The final sequence reveals another similarly named girl (Julia) to be the daughter of said publisher. The writer waves at both girls in the final scene, and the silhouette she waves at mimics her. Further SPOILERS: The first girl is topless through a lot of the movie, and BIG SPOILER: the older writer also goes Full Monty for one scene. No one else that matters gets naked.I immediately looked up interpretations of the film because it does not hold your hand in its conclusion. Julie's existence, her relationship with Julia, with the publisher, and with the writer all come into question. One character (if we accept he existed) grounds Julie in reality, it's the gardener Marcel. He has a dwarf daughter whom at the mention of her mother shuts herself in terrified, insisting she died in an accident. When he stumbles upon the freshly dug grave of Julie's latest victim, it is as if he had already seen this before. The writer looks at Julie for help, but since she's asleep, offers herself to the gardener instead. Julie is playful with Marcel, and in one scene stops him from working and pulls him in the bushes with her newly met sex partner. Julie might have had to gain the gardener' silence previously. Maybe she killed his wife. The hysteric way in which Julie pleads her mother not to leave her and her agony when she realizes she's talking to the author and her mother already isn't there could suggest she's reliving the past trauma of having been abandoned by her mother after a similar incident. Since the writer wouldn't have been there before, the gardener might have been Julie's former accomplice. Work at the villa might be compensation, it explains why neither parent wants to go back there or see Julie. Julia is younger than Julie, and could be the official family the publisher approves of. She has braces. Julie absolutely does not wear bras. She is too free, the unwanted child of a sex orgy. The book the writer publishes behind the publisher's back is an "illegitimate" product itself. It is more personal and vindictive. Etymologically, I don't know how much the director likes to play with names, but Julie's mother fled to somewhere Nice, her relationship with her father is Long done, and at the end she herself drives off to St Tropez, or Saint too much. When I first saw the writer seeing Julia for the first time, I thought Julie had duped her. The final scene might suggest the two are the same, but Julia does not seem to recognize the writer at all when they meet in London. Perhaps the writer is projecting one onto the other, but Julia is in London and wouldn't come without her father, Julie is gone to St Trop. The shadow she waves at happens to mimic the writer's wave, suggesting both are her puppets, imagination, or own projection. The movie ends leaving the silhouette anonymous. It also puts the writer back in France. Maybe the publisher gave her the villa as compensation. She did warn him her detective series would be coming back, a not so subtle blackmail after delivering him a book digging up old bones literally in his backyard. The best way to shut her up would be to give her a reason to keep people off the property he doesn't want to go back to himself. As soon as I finish writing this I'm sure I will come up with another interpretation, and I've already spent more than the movie's running time on this. This is perhaps the beauty of the Swimming Pool.

bandw (Spoilers!) This film is not for those who want everything spelled out for them, since it is open to many interpretations. I add mine here.The movie gave me some insight into how fiction writers create their work, since it delves into the things that spark an author's imagination. The writer in this movie is Sara Morton (Charlotte Rampling), a popular British author of crime fiction. When we first meet her, Sara is a bit burned out and when her publisher offers her his country house in the south of France as a temporary retreat to get her back on track, Sara accepts.We get to know some things about Sara as we see her settle into the house in France. She dresses rather plainly and is quite reserved. Even though she speaks French well, she is not very adventuresome, sticking close to the house with occasional visits to the local village. She seems to be immune to the French obsession with food, settling for fruit and yogurt. She hopes for a more intimate relation with her married publisher, John, and is disappointed when he reneges on coming to join her for a weekend on occasion. Nearing sixty, Sara seems sexually frustrated and very much alone.The movie moves into a different gear when Sara starts to conceive of a storyline for her next novel that involves an imagined visit from Julie, a fictitious version of John's daughter. For many reasons I think that there never was a real Julie. For one thing, when still in London in John's office, Sara asks him, "Would you come and visit me?," John answers, "Well, I have got my daughter." He didn't say, "I have got my younger daughter," or "I have got one of my daughters," but, "I have got my daughter." This indicated to me that John indeed had only one daughter. Sara never talks to John directly about Julie. When Julie is seen talking to her father and passes the phone to Sara, John is not on the line, and when Sara calls back, he is out of the office. If John's French daughter frequented his country home, wouldn't John tell her that Sara would be staying there? Also, the ending makes sense if there was never a Julie, since Sara's waving goodbye is seen as waving goodbye to her imagining of John's daughter for her fiction as well as her imagining of John's real daughter, whom we see at the end she has never met. Indeed I think John's comment, "I have got my daughter," was probably the initial spark for Sara's vision of an attempt at a novel.Most of what we see is Sara's conception of her novel. It is interesting how certain real events weave themselves into her fiction. Franck, the waiter at a local café becomes a character in the fiction, fantasized as one of Julie's lovers, but also fantasized by Sara as a lover for herself. Engaging to see how fiction writers may actually become involved with their imagined characters in a non-trivial way. Sara identifies with her imagining of Julie's mother to the point of wearing a dress she ascribes to her. Perhaps like actors, authors can temporarily take on the identity of their characters.Sara's fiction moves on as a rather unbelievable crime story that has Julie killing Franck and covering up the murder. At this point I think that Sara became disenchanted with what she was writing as being just another crime story; she had indicated earlier in the movie that she was tired of writing such stories. And this story seemed particularly uninspired and unbelievable (I think I have never seen a more artificial looking rock than the one Julie uses for the murder). I think that Sara, realizing the inanity of where her story was headed, then abandoned that whole effort in favor of writing the novel that Julie's mother supposedly had written. At one point Sara is sharing a meal with Julie and, after asking Julie a lot of questions, Julie remarks that Sara is showing a little too much interest in her life. Sara then says, "I am not so much interested in you as I am in your mother." I think that signaled the turning point when Sara started thinking about jettisoning the Julie story in favor of writing the romantic novel that Julie's mother supposedly had written.As to what Julie represented for Sara is anybody's guess I think. Was she an imagining of what Sara would like to have been as a young woman? Was Julie realized as part autobiography? What is real and what is imagined in a work of fiction seems to be a tricky thing. Perhaps a good deal of fiction is an expression of wish fulfillment on the part of the author.There are many elements in the movie whose interpretation is totally up for grabs. For example, what is the meaning of the egg that we see in several scenes that is constructed of several interlocking pieces? Is it a puzzle to be cracked, like this story? Is it the symbol of a new beginning for Sara? Or is it simply an ornamental knickknack? And what is the significance of the dark red inflatable mattress? How does the caretaker fit into the puzzle? Ozon and his screenwriter Emmanuèle Bernheim have presented the audience with a skeletal story that can be fleshed out in a multitude of ways.Whatever you think of the story, the movie is crisply filmed. We get a peek into what it might be like to live in a secluded area in southern France. Charlotte Rampling is in good form; it is a treat to see that she is getting good roles as she ages. Ludivine Sagnier is remarkably comfortable playing the voluptuous Julie and Charles Dance has a good turn as Sara's publisher. The score is suitably low key, but not without effect.