La Piscine (1969)

La Piscine (The Swimming Pool) is a languid 1969 romance with added crime and more than a dash of 60s decadence.

Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) and Marianne (Romy Schneider) are staying in a swanky house and they’re fairly happy together. Jean-Paul is a failed writer who now works in an ad agency but he’s taking an extended holiday on the Riviera. Then Harry turns up. Harry and Jean-Paul are old friends. Everybody who knows them assumes that Harry and Marianne had a pretty serious love affair before she met Jean-Paul.

Harry turns up with his daughter Pénélope (Jane Birkin), which is a surprise. No-one knew he had a daughter. Harry works in the music business and he’s filthy rich. He arrives in a red Maserati.

Compared to Harry Jean-Paul seems like a bit of a failure. That’s only one of the factors that contributes to the increasingly tense atmosphere. Harry takes the sort of interest in Marianne that is probably not appropriate given that she’s his best friend’s girlfriend. Marianne is also a bit too flirtatious with Harry.

And Jean-Paul takes the sort of interest in Pénélope that is maybe not appropriate given that she’s his best friend’s hot young daughter.

Pénélope throws a bit of fuel on the fire when she tells Jean-Paul what Harry really thinks of him. She also reveals that Harry had no interest in fatherhood until very recently but now he’s become rather obsessed by it. He really likes it when people think that Pénélope is his girlfriend rather than his daughter.

The tensions gradually rise. Harry and Marianne engage in some fairly heavy flirtation. Jean-Paul and Pénélope see a lot of each other.

It ends in murder. We know who the murderer is, we see it take place, but since it happens a long way into the movie I’m not going to give you any hints as to the killer’s identity. All four main characters would have had plausible motivations. The murder is shot quite cleverly. It’s hard to decide if there was any degree of premeditation. The murder may have already been underway before the killer decided to carry it through to the end. It’s nicely ambiguous.

The police aren’t sure that it is murder but Inspector Lévêque has his suspicions.

The murder mystery is not really the point of the film, although the murder brings a number of emotional involvements to a crisis point. It’s those emotional entanglements that are the focus of the movie.

All four main characters are enigmatic. We’re never quite sure what they’re thinking and we’re never quite sure what their feelings for each other really are. At the beginning Jean-Paul and Marianne seem to be happily in love but later events will have us wondering just how successful their relationship was. Is Harry trying to rekindle his old romance with Marianne because he still loves her, or in order to humiliate Jean-Paul, or to reassure himself about his masculinity? That red Maserati suggests a man with a need to assert his masculinity. Is Marianne really interested in reviving her old love affair with Harry, is she trying to make Jean-Paul jealous, or is she just feeling vaguely bored and dissatisfied?

Has Jean-Paul fallen in love with Pénélope or is just a passing sexual infatuation? What is Pénélope feeling? She’s only eighteen. Is she just a teenager trying to play grown-up sex games, is she in love with Jean-Paul, is it an attempt to deal with her daddy issues? Does she realise that her actions could hurt others?

What makes it interesting is that we never get definitive answers to any of these questions, possibly because the characters themselves don’t fully understand their own actions. They inhabit a world of wealth and privilege in which selfishness is taken for granted. They are accustomed to seek pleasure from both love and sex but they’re not accustomed to taking responsibility.

Alain Delon is moody and slightly mysterious as Jean-Paul. We suspect that Jean-Paul is dissatisfied with his life but won’t admit it. He seems vaguely tormented, in the brooding but sexy manner that Alain Delon did so well.

Harry is pretty obviously a creep but rich creeps who drive Maseratis get away with a lot. He’s superficially charming with a slightly cruel edge. Harry thinks that everybody thinks he’s a great guy. Maurice Ronet nails Harry’s personality pretty well.

Romy Schneider is perfect. Jane Birkin is of course gorgeous and she makes Pénélope interestingly complex. We have no idea what Pénélope is up to. She might not be up to anything. She may be just bored. She views her father with a certain amount of amused scepticism. She’s pretty obviously attracted to Jean-Paul. It’s a fine performance as a teenager out of her depth.

Criterion’s DVD (they’ve put it out on Blu-Ray as well) offers some nice extras.

La Piscine was a huge hit at the time. It was a major boost to Romy Schneider’s career and it made Jane Birkin a very hot property. It enhanced director Jacques Deray’s reputation (it was a deliberate change of pace for him). It’s either an art movie with major commercial appeal or a commercial movie with major artistic overtones and it works successfully on both levels. It was that rare kind of movie that audiences loved and film scholars could get excited by.

A brilliant subtle slightly disturbing movie. Highly recommended.