Rating: C-
Dir: Jacques Deray
Star: Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet, Jane Birkin
a.k.a. La piscine
I was vaguely operating under the misapprehension this was subsequently remade in 2003 as Swimming Pool, starring Charlotte Rampling. That is not the case, though there is enough overlap beyond the title to explain the confusion. In particular, both are part of the peculiarly Gallic genre, “Attractive people lounging about in bathing suits.” This runs over two hours, and I’d say a good eighty minutes is focused almost entirely on that. It’s roughly seventy more than I could have used. Our main loungers are Jean-Paul (Delon) and Marianne (Schneider), occupants of a large villa in the South of France, with an even larger swimming-pool. Marianne’s main erogenous zone appears to be her back. I’m not judging.
Their indolent and tranquil vacation is disturbed by the arrival of her ex, Harry (Ronet) and his daughter, Penelope (Birkin). Marianne invites them to stay, something which Jean-Paul accepts with impressive calmness. I’d punt Harry out on his ear, especially after he heads into town and brings back a slew of people to the villa for an impromptu party. Jean-Paul just lights another Gauloise and reaches for the bottle-opener. Then again, there’s Penelope, whose teenage presence Marianne is equally phlegmatic about, despite John-Paul’s growing relationship to her. If you want scenes of French people passive-aggressively sniping at each other, usually while sunbathing, this is the film for you. Personally, I got tired of this Lifestyles of the Moderately Rich and Lazy, and wanted something to happen.
Eventually, it does, albeit roughly at the two-thirds point, with the sudden death of one participant. It looks accidental, but the local police detective is not convinced, and hangs around asking pointed questions. The survivors start to sweat, and the dynamic between them changes. However, the film ends without proper resolution; I found myself wishing it had gone on further, since things were getting interesting. Or, at least, more interesting than it had been before the fatality. The film is in love with its characters to a greater degree than I was, although I can’t deny their beauty. If you wanted to come up with a power couple of sixties European cinema, you couldn’t do much better than Delon and Schneider (IRL, they’d broken up five years previously).
I couldn’t say I was able to relate to anyone here particularly well, and my general apathy to the players only grew deeper as this wore on. If I’d been in their shoes, this would have lasted ten minutes, and a key line would be, “Can I drive you to your AirBnb?” If I want to experience the raw ennui of oppressive heat, all I need to do here in Arizona is crack open a window. We have the swimming pool too. It’s just that, rather than being the focus of relationship drama, the last time I was in it meaningfully, was fishing a dead dog out. True story. Just not one I foresee becoming a movie anytime in the near future.