Swim With Me
I didn’t realize what it would be like. A friend had come in from out of town and wanted to see a movie. I liked the idea of myself as someone who takes a resident of Nevada to see French cinema; he chose La Piscine. We were both self-important high school seniors. Never mind that we both, having had some coffee, spent the three hours before the movie looking for bathrooms in downtown Manhattan. We ended up at a Trader Joe’s–very edgy, really cool. The movie is full of flesh. Given that it’s French, I suppose that I am obliged to use the term erotic. In reality, the movie is both too slow and too unsubtle to merit such a distinction. But you may fairly ask what it’s about. “Jane Birkin in a bikini!” “Alain Delon’s face!” “A very nice country house!” These are all legitimate answers. When one speaks of La Piscine, the factual seems illegitimate, but facts I will give.
The movie was made in 1969, by Jacques Deray. A couple, Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) and Marianne (Romy Schneider), is spending the summer in the south of France. Harry (Maurice Ronet, whoever that is), an old lover of Marianne’s, shows up and brings his attractive teenage daughter, Penelope (Jane Birkin). There is a swimming pool at the house. Alcoholism, jealousy, masculinity, random sex–the predictable stuff. Harry drowns, courtesy of Jean-Paul. That’s pretty much all of it. Marianne, who knows all, remains with her man. It’s a pretty boring movie. My grandmother considered Alain Delon the sexiest man of all time.
Everyone is naked half the time. I do not object to this in principle. In fact, I don’t object to it at all. Three of the four principal actors were internationally famous for their good looks. No one minds when Alain Delon sunbathes. The problem is that La Piscine feels like an advertisement rather than a movie. The director has an eye for beauty and a talent for showing it to us at its worst, such that it looks even better. But everyone buys what he has to sell. There’s no point in pushing it further. When Jean-Paul drowns Harry, he doesn’t get wet. His passion never takes him into the pool. This, to me, represents the same psychological problem as does the film’s limp pageantry.
Maybe I’m just an East Coast liberal who gets off on gritty documentary-style films. I know that I’m too in thrall to the authentic. Silence, of the kind that prevails in La Piscine, is authentic. The sexual chemistry between Romy Schneider and Alain Delon is perhaps too authentic. I longed to cry out, “swim with me.” Let something imperfect into your pool. Show that the water of your imagination can transform anything, can conjure deeper fantasy than that of tired erotic tropes.
Let me assert that one can have feelings without great good looks. And let me remark on the strange sterility of beauty, as it exists in the film. There is such a chill in the warmth of the colors. That’s probably the most subtle device in the whole thing–not so impressive. Or maybe very impressive. Someone should take a stand for superficiality. The problem is that, faced with such beauty, we can only regard the characters as objects. The struggle, then, should be to give them back the interiority that we have stolen in the process of admiration. But La Piscine is content to let us look. It never invites us to swim. At the end, we get a series of close-ups; cut to the sky and down to the pool, rippling in the Riviera heat; and then to the lovers clutching each other, the beautiful faces contorted and half-concealed by an embrace. We foresee plenty of erotic tension and well-shaped suffering to come. But if we see beauty, beauty sees the water. A mechanism of reflection and, perhaps, of apparent self-reflection. No one ever stops looking at things. Once again, the words came. Swim with me.