Swimming Pool: (1969. dir: Jacques Deray) One of those overheated, madly sensuous European films from the sixties that fails only as often as its sexual tension fails, which is more often than it ought, since Alain Delon is ridiculously beautiful here, impossibly beautiful. In the protracted quiet of the film's opening moments, we close in on him while he sweats, motionless by the eponymous pool, burnished and lethargized with constant sun and sexual satisfaction and encroaching ennui. We hear a woman call his name and see his indifferent response; he is roused only for an enraged moment when she douses him with water before he falls back into his stupor. She emerges, and we see it is Romy Schneider, wearing an enigmatic smile and little else, and the ensuing make-out scene is one of the most sensuously filmed ever, with camera angles I can only call very French indeed. Delon's enthusiasm to get her top off in order to scratch her back properly, with its contrast to his previous inertia, is galvanic.
Schneider is very good in a nearly thankless role which involves a lot of Mona-Lisa-like suggestive smiling at both her lover and her obnoxious ex-lover (who comes to visit with his coltishly sexy MacGuffin of a virgin-daughter), smiles evocative of a supreme confidence in her sexual power. It is only towards the end, when the plot breaks through the almost silly thickness of constant libidinous energy and takes a more interesting turn that she, and indeed the movie itself, really begins to engage above the crotch level.
The trouble with these films, -- the kind of swinging film showing us the lifestyle of the sexually liberated rich and beautiful people, -- is that they tend towards a strange naivete, perhaps because they're designed for the leering, voyeuristic pleasure of those of us who don't engage in the lifestyle and therefore have little knowledge to draw on in judging their veracity (or perhaps because the lifestyle itself is based on some basic fallacy; I cannot speak to that, however, never having lived among the rich and beautiful except in the cinema). The truest part of it seemed to me that heaviness of boredom at the beginning, as if the life of this gorgeous couple was constructed around a wall of ennui punctuated by great ecstatic lunges of passion followed by ever-deeper plunges into a treacherous hogwallow of post-coital melancholy. Add to that what my boyfriend would call its coy "black-out" amorphousness (as in, "OK, so did they have sex after the black-out or not?"), and you get a lot of teasing with no clear answers.
Which is alright, it turns out, since in the end it's not the sex which matters; it's the sexual tension that is the force which propels the action. One of the film's flaws is that the script employs a Pinteresque avoidance of the central issue (which is always sex) in its conversation, but without Pinter's, you know, genius, so for example the dinner-scene during which the four child-adults are sitting around pointedly Not Talking About The Sex Which May Or May Not Have Happened During The Black-out is a little embarrassing, but in a way which seems true enough to life, so one forgives it, even as one is thinking rather wistfully of Pinter.
It's possible this film was trying to evoke Purple Noon, that grand gesture of boldly-colored French noir which cemented Delon's stardom in the first place, with its sun-soaked eroticism and twisted psychological darkness. It's not as good as that, but it's not bad. And Delon and Schneider are not just easy on the eyes; the mere act of watching them is in fact so pleasurable that it's nigh on impossible to look away.
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