Charlotte Rampling in Francois Ozon's Swimming Pool: The Writer's Life

In the opening of Francois Ozon's Swimming Pool, Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling), a successful English mystery novelist, is so done in that when a fan on the London Underground recognizes her from the dustjacket photo of a book she's reading, Sarah tells the woman she's made a mistake, that she's not who the woman thinks she is. Dour Sarah, otherwise looking like any respectable, buttoned-up, middle-aged British woman, is on her way to see her publisher John Bosload (Charles Dance), in whose office she suffers from what is either a fit of jealousy over his attention to another, younger (male) author, or the resentment of a rejected lover, or both. The big problem is that she can't get started on her new book, and so John sends her to his house in the Luberon, in Provence, to relax so the words will come. They do come, but this isn't a movie like Enchanted April (1991) in which British women blossom in a warmer climate, nor is it like the adaptation of E.M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread (1992; the novel is available in its entirety online) in which British Protestant rectitude is turned inside out in its confrontation with an Italian blend of sensuality and honor that it finds incomprehensible. Sarah brings her complications with her to the French provinces, and they remain inside her, though the script, by Ozon and the novelist Emmanuele Bernheim, finds an ingenious way to manifest them for us.

As Sarah settles into John's country house, Ozon establishes her compulsiveness in short, brisk order. She's only halfway having a tourist vacation--at the grocery she chooses Diet Coke over the local wine (to wind herself up not down), and at home she whips up huge tubs of some kind of yogurt mixture that she wolfs down, as if eating were a miserable chore to be got through. The movie gives us a strong sense of her habits; you feel that Sarah is going to be Sarah wherever in the world she goes. In the course of the movie you see that this inflexibility protects her talent.

Sarah's control over the house is challenged when John's young French daughter Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) arrives and turns the downstairs into a disco-bordello. Julie, with her purposely messy hairstyle and casual immodesty, is a contemporary-futureless adolescent whose habits are counterprogrammed against Sarah's writing schedule: she chats loudly on the phone during the day and at night goes out and brings random men back, plays loud music, has loud sex, sleeps wherever and late, hungover from booze and pot. (The set-up is similar to Lisa Cholodenko's Laurel Canyon (2003), except here the older character is the prude and the movie contains no facile exhortation to live more openly.)

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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