Charlotte Rampling in Francois Ozon's Swimming Pool: The Writer's Life - Page 6

I can imagine an actress like Jane Fonda bringing out more layers of temperament in Sarah (as she did playing Lillian Hellman in Julia (1977) despite that movie's emotionally simplistic and politically gullible take on its heroine), but Fonda also strikes me as vain enough that she wouldn't respect the crabbed intimacy the movie forces us into with Sarah just as she is. (Though once upon a time, in They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969) and Klute (1971), Fonda did just that when no other American actress would.) Another actress (Helen Mirren?) could better express the cost to Sarah of the distance her vocation puts between her and the world but might not have Rampling's watered-silk variability. And I can't imagine anybody being funnier than Rampling when Julie gets her stoned and makes her dance: she uses her own self-consciousness to extend the character's range. Ozon and Bernheim may have hoped that Rampling would fill out the part more, or perhaps they knew that Rampling would preserve their character as written by merely illustrating it. She illustrates it to a T and has never been more effective onscreen.

The movie might also have been more revelatory with less of a lights-and-mirrors method of bringing out Sarah's form of working psychosis. But I'm not complaining: the trickiness raises it out of the "psychological study" category into the realm of entertainment. One of the mysteries of pop is that you can see deep reflections in a shallow pool (the Graham Greene phenomenon). Ozon and Bernheim use Sarah to divulge some of the twisted little secrets of the artist's psychology--maybe it's only one aspect of that psychology, and maybe it's only of one kind of artist (the dealer in mayhem), but it's so impeccably conceived and carried out that I've never felt less remote from an artist figure in a movie. The movie closes in on her with no pretension or romanticization (the purpose of irony, after all). She's an artist but both her talent and torment are presented in precise, quotidian, decidedly non-Parnassian terms as those of a buggily driven, self-centered craftswoman. Ozon shows a surgeon's steadiness--the movie is small-scaled and methodical without being quaint or dry, and it captures the blood-flow returning to this pinched woman without trite effusion. One of the few "clever" movies that expands when you think about it, Swimming Pool is a true accomplishment in the field of brainy pleasure.

And Ozon has provided a nifty certificate of authenticity (again from the press kit interview):

Before shooting, I suggested to Ruth Rendell that she might like to come up with the story for Sarah to be writing in the film. I sent her my script and she answered by return, very frostily, assuming that I was asking her to novelize the screenplay: she told me she was perfectly capable of writing her own stories, thank you. Charlotte Rampling found this highly amusing. She said that Sarah Morton would have reacted exactly the same way.

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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