YO! Features
Raunchy, oui, oui
Older woman pitted against young girl in erotic French tale
By GARY THOMPSON
thompsg@phillynews.com
Though Hollywood movies are reputed to be depraved and lurid, they're generally pretty square.
Reformers have taken over, and lately it's been a very PG kind of town. Where sex is concerned, it's almost prim. Hollywood's current idea of a "sexy" movie is "Charlie's Angels 2," where the most risque scenes are of swimsuit modeling.
If you want the harder stuff, you have to go behind the counter, to France and French movies, which are often completely lurid (several have featured porn stars in key roles) or, in the case of "Swimming Pool," genuinely erotic.
The movie is technically an English-language picture, but it's written and directed by Frenchman Francois Ozon ("Under the Sand"), and it has a Frenchman's laissez-faire attitude toward actresses keeping their clothes on.
The suspenseful "Swimming Pool" is basically a titanic catfight between an uptight Englishwoman (Charlotte Rampling) who senses she's losing her sex appeal and a randy French girl (Ludivine Sagnier) who's freely exercising hers.
They square off at a French country home where the Englishwoman, a mystery writer, has gone to work on her next book. The home is the property of her publisher (Charles Dance), with whom she's involved, though lately he's shown signs of being bored.
She goes to his home in France hoping he'll show up, but he doesn't. Instead, the man's estranged daughter arrives, and she's a terror. She drinks, smokes, trashes the house and brings home a different guy every night for noisy ravishing.
She is constantly topless, often bottomless, and looks like Anna Kournikova, which I observed because I'm a trained observer.
Because these are women in a Frenchman's movie, they do not become fast friends, as they would in an American movie. They become enemies, competitors, rivals. Their talons extend, their eyes narrow, and they curse each other.
Slut! Prude! Fur flies, and the women decide to test themselves by competing for the attention of a handsome waiter, a sort of Gallic Marlboro Man. For Rampling's character, the issue isn't the man, it's her self-image: She's jealous of the younger woman's sexual power and wants to gauge her own.
The stakes are high, and it's not long before there is a murder and a cover-up.
"Swimming Pool" comes by its "erotic thriller" label honestly, not merely because the women are naked, but because they deploy their sexuality in a way that's crucial to the narrative - the catalyst for it, the point of it, in a way.
Given all of that, I wish the ending of "Swimming Pool" didn't suck so much, and suck in a way that defies description, since to do so would give too much away.
In general, we can say the ending is ironic, since the movie turns out to be at its best before all is laid bare.
