SYNOPSIS
(INCLUDES SPOILERS):
It’s
the heat of summer in the south of France. In the foothills overlooking the
resort town of Saint-Tropez and the blue Mediterranean sits a villa occupied by
Marianne (Romy Schneider) and her
current lover Jean-Paul Leroy (Alain
Delon), house-sitting for some friends who have gone to India.
The centerpiece of the property, which is surrounded by vineyards, is a swimming pool (la piscine in French) which is where most of the action takes place. Jean-Paul and Marianne have known each other for over two years. They are both writers but Marianne is the more successful; after Jean-Paul’s latest failed effort he has given up serious writing and gone into advertising.
They are lying beside the pool, engaged in foreplay, when they hear the phone ring and their housekeeper says it’s for Marianne. It turns out to be Harry Lannier (Maurice Ronet), an old friend, and on impulse, Marianne invites Harry to come and stay with them for a few days.
Harry is a highly successful music producer who drives a brand new and very expensive 1968 Maserati Ghibli. He’s been a friend of Jean-Paul’s since the latter was a 17-year-old, and he was Marianne’s lover four years earlier. If we use the actors’ actual ages as a guide to their characters’ ages, Ronet (b. 1927), Delon (b. 1935), Schneider (b. 1938), at the time of filming in the summer of 1968 Harry was 41, Jean-Paul was 32 and Marianne was 30. Harry arrives with his 18-year-old daughter Pénélope (Jane Birkin, b. 1946) in tow, a daughter that neither Jean-Paul nor Marianne had known about.
As Pénélope tells Jean-Paul, she had never met Harry; her mother had said he was dead, and now that she’s all grown up he shows up and wants to be a part of her life, know everything about her and take her everywhere. He admits to fawning over her and getting a thrill when people think she is his girlfriend. Clearly his relationship with her borders on the incestuous. She also tells Jean-Paul that Harry doesn’t really like him and thinks he has no talent. She observes that Harry really doesn’t like anyone, but wants everyone to adore him.
As the drama unfolds, Harry clearly wants to rekindle his relationship with Marianne, and Jean-Paul is determined to seduce Pénélope while protecting his relationship with Marianne.
Harry continually taunts Jean-Paul, reminding him that he was Marianne’s lover, that he is more successful in business, and that he has a desirable young daughter. Meanwhile, Marianne watches what is happening, and as Jean-Paul’s interest in Pénélope becomes more obvious, Marianne retaliates by becoming more playful and affectionate with Harry.
Finally,
one afternoon, Marianne tells them she needs to go shopping in Saint-Tropez and
asks Harry to take her in his Maserati. After they leave, Jean-Paul invites Pénélope
to go swimming with him at a nearby beach on the French Riviera. By the time
Jean-Paul and Pénélope return, it is dark, Pénélope’s hair is wet and matted,
she is holding her bikini and is wearing Jean-Paul’s jacket. It is obvious they
have had sex. The dinner, which Marianne and Harry had prepared, is tense. At
the end of the meal Harry tells Marianne that he and Pénélope will be leaving
in the morning, that if he left her with Jean-Paul and Marianne, her mother,
with whom Pénélope lives in Lausanne, would kill him.
Harry
then goes out, to see his friend Fred in Saint-Tropez before he leaves. After
he leaves, Jean-Paul tells Marianne he also will be leaving in the next day or
two. Marianne assumes it is to go to Lausanne to see Pénélope.
Harry
comes back drunk and runs his Maserati into the partially-open villa gate. Then
he begins an argument with Jean-Paul beside the pool. He tells him that it is
over between Jean-Paul and Pénélope and that he’s taking her away in the
morning. Harry taunts Jean-Paul about his relationship with Marianne, calls
Jean-Paul a spoiled brat who always had to be handled delicately, with kid
gloves.
Jean-Paul
accuses Harry of being jealous. Harry swings at him, misses and falls into the
pool. He reaches out to Jean-Paul for help and Jean-Paul half pulls him out,
then lets him fall back into the pool. Harry, cold and drunk with a stomach
cramp, cannot get out on his own and Jean-Paul pushes him back in every time he
tries to get out. Then Jean-Paul takes his hand, pushes his head under water
and drowns him. Then he undresses Harry, leaving him in just his undershorts,
as though he stripped on purpose to go for a swim, hides his shirt and pants,
rolls Harry back into the pool, goes to his room for a dry shirt and pants and
leaves them folded on a table beside the pool.
The
police inspector Leveque from Marseilles suspects Harry’s death wasn’t an
accident, because Harry had worn his expensive non-waterproof watch in the pool
and because Harry’s folded up clothes had nothing in the pockets and no sweat
in the fabric, as though they had not been worn. The questions he asks make
Marianne suspect it wasn’t an accident and that Jean-Paul had drowned him. He
claims that if someone had pushed Harry into the pool, drowned him, then
changed his clothes, the result would be the same. By the time the inspector
leaves after his second visit, Marianne is sure Jean-Paul drowned Harry.
When
Jean-Paul tells Marianne that he is driving Pénélope back to Lausanne, Marianne
realizes that Pénélope has replaced her and that her love affair with Jean-Paul
is over. She begins to see Jean-Paul in a new light, as the murderer of her
former lover and the seducer of his daughter. And then Jean-Paul, believing
Marianne has found Harry’s clothes in the woodpile, tells her the story of what
happened, and Marianne makes the decision to protect Jean-Paul, to be complicit
in Harry’s death, and to send Pénélope home.
And
at the Nice airport, Pénélope tells Marianne she doesn’t believe anything that
Jean-Paul said, and when she asks Marianne how her father died, Marianne says
he drowned, and it was an accident.
The
inspector knows what really happened, that Marianne is protecting Jean-Paul,
and that if she ever has any regrets or changes her mind, she should come to
him and he will reopen the case. In the final scene Marianne plans to leave
Jean-Paul, but inexplicably, at the last minute she changes her mind and
decides to stay with him.
La piscine, co-written and
directed by Jacques Deray, is a
masterpiece of flirtation, jealousy, lust and seduction, male competition and a
sophisticated amoral view of love in 1960s France. It was the fourth most
popular film in France in 1969, partially because former real-life lovers Delon
and Schneider were reuniting, bringing a palpable erotic chemistry to their
performances, and partially because Birkin’s lover, Serge Gainsbourg, had publicly
warned Delon and Ronet in the tabloids to stay away from her.
Although Pénélope has the smallest role, she is the key to this story. While
Harry and Jean-Paul are ostensibly friends, the basis of their relationship is
hatred, and it is Pénélope who brings that hatred to the surface. In fact, La piscine can be viewed as a take on
the Greek Oedipus myth: Jean-Paul (the son) kills Harry (the father) so he can
seduce Harry’s daughter.
Alain
Delon’s image was solidified by La
piscine; Schneider’s was liberated. Though she had been working steadily,
she had not yet distanced herself from the wholesome Sissi Trilogy that had made her internationally famous as a child
actress in the 1950s. But her performance as Marianne not only announced her
arrival as a performer of sensuality and maturity, but led to a
career-revitalizing, award-winning, five-film partnership with director Claude
Sautet, beginning with 1970’s The Things
of Life.
THE
CRITERION 2021 BLU-RAY RELEASE:
Taking
advantage of its four lead actors' multilingual abilities, La piscine was shot simultaneously in French and English near
Saint-Tropez, France, from August to October 1968. The Criterion blu-ray disc
offers both the French version and a slightly shorter English-language version
(The Swimming Pool: “First Love Never
Dies), which had been released outside of France in 1969. For it, director
Jacques Deray made his edits based on performances, rather than doing a
shot-by-shot re-creation of the French version.
The
English-language version contains a brief 20-second alternate ending showing
the police inspector and uniformed officers returning to the villa and getting
out of their police vehicle. The assumption is that they are there to arrest
Jean-Paul, or perhaps both Jean-Paul and Marianne. Deray and his producers
added the brief final shot to La piscine
upon its release in Spain in 1969, to appease Franco-era censors upset by its
morally ambiguous original ending, and the same shot concludes the
English-language version of the film.
The
blu-ray disc also contains Fifty Years
Later, a 2019 half-hour documentary made by Agnès Vincent-Deray, widow of director Jacques Deray, on the
occasion of the film's fiftieth anniversary. It features interviews with actors
Alain Delon and Jane Birkin as well as screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and Jean-Emmanuel
Conil, who wrote the novel on which the screenplay was based.
It
also contains a 20-minute interview with scholar Nick Rees-Roberts on the film’s cinematic and aesthetic legacy
conducted by the Criterion in which he traces the influence of La piscine on the worlds of film and
fashion in the half century since its release.
Finally,
there is archival production and promotional footage, and trailers in French
and English, and the package has a liner notes booklet with an essay by film
critic Jessica Kiang.
Labels:
crime, drama, French-language, romance, Romy Schneider, tragedy
IMDb 71/100
MetaScore (critics=tbd, viewers=tbd)
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=74, viewers=78)
Blu-ray
Amazon
Jessica Kiang essay
Wikipedia
1968 Maserati Ghibli
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