Starring Charles Dance, Marc Fayolle, Ludivine Sagnier, Charlotte Rampling, directed by Frank Ozon
Swimming Pool is a sophisticated and new kind of movie for our postmodern world in which reality and fantasy become so blurred together it's hard to tell the difference. Well, sorry, I'm not on board. Call me old-fashioned but I like stories with coherent beginnings and endings and while I appreciate Ozon's effort to give his films that artistic edge, I felt like I almost wasted a ticket. I say `almost', because if you trim down a few minutes, you have, more or less, a coherent story and up until the end I felt pretty entranced. Set in an appropriately eerie French house, the main characters are a well-known writer and her editor's sexually loose daughter who are forced to temporarily live in it. Despite all the sex, drinking, and violence going on, there's very little going on. Overall, the storyline is very static so it helps that Rampling and Sagnier show so much chemistry as two awkwardly mismatched roommates.