In our mad rush to Freedomize everything French, from fries to toast to kisses, we've somehow managed to overlook that most cherished of all Yankee-Gallic overlaps: the cinema. After all, when we finish the arduous task of renaming/ reclaiming all our favorite comfort foods, what better, more logical next step than to start messing with the movies?
I'm only kidding, of course, but there is a point to the joke. If ever there were a director, French or otherwise, more deserving of the designation freedom filmmaker, it would have to be Francois Ozon.
Ozon is the affable bad boy of French cinema, a ridiculously talented young iconoclast whose films follow no rules other than an apparently self-directed edict to constantly surprise us. He dashes off a devastating little exercise in horror like See the Sea, follows it up with the acclaimed psychological anti-thriller Under the Sand, and then sets tongues wagging with the colorful, near-camp of Eight Women. Ozon is both provocative and prolific, someone who clearly loves movies, loves entertaining an audience almost as much as he loves shaking us up, and, most important, seems hell-bent on never repeating himself. Ozon has never made the same movie twice, and, like John Wesley Harding, has never been known to make a foolish move.
The director's latest, Swimming Pool, continues that enigmatic winning streak. The guiding intelligence, mastery of style and richly layered multiple meanings clearly identify Swimming Pool as an Ozon film. But it is also quite unlike anything that has come before it.
With Swimming Pool, Ozon extends his hand across the water in several ways, reuniting with the veteran British actress Charlotte Rampling (star of Under the Sand), while offering us his first movie shot in the English language. It's a move sure to endear the director to freedom lovers of all stars and stripes.
As for Ozon's decision to work again with Rampling, it's a rematch made in heaven. Swimming Pool crystallizes a collaboration that now looks to be pitched half way between Josef von Sternberg's work with Marlene Dietrich and the Scorsese/De Niro pairings. That's a lot of history to live up to, obviously, but Ozon's relationship with and presentation of his star is every bit as intriguing as either of the above-mentioned legendary pairings.
Rampling becomes both icon and alter ego to Ozon. In a distinctly modern updating of von Sternberg's visual adulation of Dietrich, both Under the Sand and Swimming Pool revel in Rampling's aging-but-still-formidable presence while refusing to artificially glamorize her. Ozon's camera lingers intimately on every last wrinkle, exploring and caressing each mark of age. "I don't want to lie to the audience," Ozon told me in an interview last year. "Charlotte Rampling is 50 years old, and she's beautiful as a woman of 50 years old."
As for the alter-ego part of the equation, Rampling's character in Swimming Pool is, like Ozon, a successful artist who just can't be pigeonholed. "You must have mistaken me for someone else," are Rampling's first words in the movie, addressing a befuddled fan who's recognized her. "I'm not the person you think I am."
Rampling's character is Sarah Morton, a popular writer of crime novels who has taken a home in the French countryside, hoping the change of scenery will stir the old creative juices. Sarah is, in some ways, the stereotypical spitting image of a stuffy, repressed Englishwoman: stiff, methodical and given to a wardrobe of endless shades of drab brown. As in all Ozon films, though, the character we're offered is ultimately a slippery one. As it happens, Sarah's real story, as well as that of the movie itself, exists somewhere below the surface.
Swimming Pool begins heating up when Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), the illegitimate French daughter of Sarah's publisher, unexpectedly shows up at the writer's doorstep. Slutty, seductive and unabashedly hedonistic, Julie appears to be everything Sarah's not, and the two women quickly find themselves butting heads while attempting to share the same space.
At the same time, there's a fascinating, almost symbiotic effect that the crass young nymphet and the uptight, middle-age writer have upon one another, and that becomes the heated core around which Ozon's film revolves. Each woman begins taking an unusual, almost obsessive interest in the other's life, culminating in Sarah's confiscation of Julie's diary. Eventually, Sarah begins using the girl's life as source material for her new book, and possibly more.
Things become even stranger from there, and the film begins to take on the air of a classic Hitchcock mystery, albeit Hitchcock filtered through an oddly metaphysical lens that opens up the events to any number of interpretations. Even the evocative music sounds like a slightly atonal take on one of Bernard Hermann's signature scores for Hitch.
Suspense mixes with wonder, wonder mixes with inexplicable angst, and, through Ozon's deft mise-en-scene, ordinary, everyday objects — a garden wall, a tarp-covered pool, an unnaturally red raft — become ominous signs of what's about to happen. (The philosophically inclined among us might prefer to think of them as signifiers of existential dread.) The action gradually intensifies and, just when we think things are headed toward some inevitable resolution, Ozon pulls a series of rugs out from under us, causing us to question everything we think we've come to know about these characters.
Swimming Pool will not appeal to everyone. It's a witty, hypnotic and occasionally mystical experience, but one that's often simply too cryptic for its own good. The film can seem maddeningly unclear as to just where the story's going, and, frankly, many of us will still be utterly confused even by the time the closing credits roll. That's all part of the fun and games of an Ozon film, though, and Swimming Pool, at the very least, offers plenty to talk about after the house lights come up.
The movie's controlled minimalism often makes it seems like a two-character chamber piece, but ultimately, Swimming Pool is the story of just one person, of the writer Sarah (standing in for Ozon) — a portrait of the artist. Even more to the point, what Ozon is giving us is a worm's eye view of the creative process itself. How much of what we see on screen is "real" and how much is purely of Sarah's invention is finally a riddle for us to ponder. Swimming Pool isn't telling. What we're offered instead is a nod, a wink, and plenty of hidden depths, heavy with all the possibilities that our imaginations will allow.
Film Critic Lance Goldenberg can be reached at lgoldenb@tampabay.rr.com or 813-248-8888 ext. 157.
This article appears in Jul 31 – Aug 6, 2003.
