Swimming Pool Film Review

Just simply complicated

The Swimming Pool is an unpredictable and suspenseful character-driven film that never ceased to linger on my mind. It has mystery. It has violence. It has sex. It plays with reality and realistic imagination. It has complexity in such a simple setting.

The first hour of the film was apparently dull and boring. Sarah Morton, a mystery novelist who’s in the middle of enlightenment crisis, chases inspiration in the house of her editor in France. The first scenes where Sarah starts to love how warm and peaceful the house and town was were grippingly faulty. The stage set were oddly bare. It was dragging, slow, stationary, and sometimes tends to get irrelevant. If I were watching this movie without being encouraged to do so, I’ll lose interest in finishing the film. This is where I proved that sex is an essential part of the film especially when everything starts to get plain. Julie, the sexy and liberated one and only daughter of Sarah’s editor, enters the scene. Julie is a beautiful hedonistic young French girl with craze for one-night stands with men that apparently look years older from her. Her presence disrupts Sarah’s tranquility thus creating a conflict between the two seemingly unlikable characters.

It is compellingly odd that Julie knows that Sarah is a writer who writes dirty things she doesn’t even do. In the following scenes, the plot runs in a flat note again. Sarah’s story turns from that “funny” (as what she described it to his editor), dirty mystery story into Julie’s life. This sudden change of focusing story for her novel becomes a venue for the two to work things out and get to know each other better. It is also strange that when Julie discovers what Sarah has been up to all the time, she did not react the way a person usually does when violated of her privacy and taken advantage of. And then the story comes back again into life in a much unexpected manner. Violence takes place. Julie kills a man that refused to have sex with her and Sarah helps her out by burying all possible evidences near the pool where Julie killed the man. And Sarah teaches her to act as if nothing happened. She even seduced the caretaker of the house’s swimming pool in order for him not to discover their dirty little secret. This became the twisted irony of the story – Sarah becomes the liberated woman while Julie transforms into a conservative kid-like lady.

But nothing was as unexpected as the ending. After Sarah finishes her novel and her director rejects it, she leaves him a publicized copy of her novel from another publication company and insisted him to give it to her daughter. Then she hasted away when the daughter of her editor comes into the door. And that daughter is not Julie.

Symbolisms in the story play a very essential role in understanding and unraveling the mystery behind the film’s ending. The swimming pool becomes the instrument of the story as the venue of revealing new characters and sudden change of scenes. The statement Julie told Sarah as I mentioned above and the old men that Julie makes love with symbolized that Julie was just Sarah’s other ego. Also, Sarah’s evident longing for her editor to come became the indicator that she hungers for lust – which is one subject that she applies in her novel. But my interpretation could be wrong. And this is the main purpose of the director – to let his viewers extract what was real from what was not.

            As a woman, I understand what Sarah is going through during that phase of her life. She is jealous and seeks to be desired. And as a writer, I also understood her frustration of writing stories that she wanted to happen to her but impossibly will.

If I were to judge her state, she is emotionally unstable and mentally disturbed in a reserved manner. She needs psychological aid yet she doesn’t seem like it. No person would ever know her state because she keeps everything to herself. The story of Julie’s mother could’ve been hers. And family is one aspect of life that could affect a person’s condition.

            Though the beginning worked with the film’s aim, nobody would fully understand it not until the end of the film. This kind of style gathers lesser appreciation since it dwells too much in the depth of the story but not upon its breadth. One sees a film successful in its aim when its plot’s beginning, body and end are fully understood by its audience. I do not care if ever the director stands against my point of view because it’s his own style of expressing his ideas. I’ll firmly stand that his style is ineffective and unpersuasive especially to men wherein they do not fully understand how a woman thinks and relates on things.

            The movie is commendable for its uniqueness and perfection in playing with reality and fiction yet it is not something worth remembering. You become bothered, yes. But it leaves you the question – “who is Julie?” and nothing else.