Swimming Pool

Marta Donati

This is a subtle film on the role of the writer, their relationship to reality and inspiration. The thriller plot is a background for a more complex interplay of patterns of imagination, fantasy and desire.

Operation Kino

A Hitchcock murder mystery? Without the murder? And without the mystery? With Ludivine Sagnier? Yes, please.

Su

Such a sick and powerful imagination. Of course there were some holes in the plot but it was what i expect. The final scene has a different meaning for people depending on their imagination i guess.

the.deft.one

Mysterious, erotic, intriguing, voyeuristic, this is Ozon's best film. A simmering potboiler with echoes of Hitchcock (Rear Window) and Polanski, it's a true chamber piece, a film of style, atmosphere and strong central performances. The ambiguous ending suggests this isn't water tight but it barely matters.

eric gould

Could a French summer retreat inspire a sultry romantic murder story? Charlotte Rampling wonderfully plays the cool dim-eyed crime writer Sarah Morton whose publisher offers her the chance to stay at his rural villa in Luberon's idyllic countryside to inspire her next book. Tensions frustrate Sarah's focus when the publisher's daughter Julie arrives and attracts a stormy sexual mystery around her. One of Ozon's best.

dionysus67

Another supposedly auteurist feat from Ozon aiming again to dupe (rather than educate) the viewer. The camera's rapacious gaze on Sagnier's body is not enough to hold attention or to elevate this into some sort of Hitchockean exercise in visual politics. Instead, a most ludicrous direction (the last shots of Rampling waving at her [fictional] idol are nearly parodic) transforms this into a third-rate film-novella.

ig_____or

What was real? What wasn't? Towards the end things did get very surreal, and I really could feel that some twist was coming, but I expected that it would leave me with more definitive conclusions. But I didn't mind this sort of open-ending at all: what an excellent film! It was never obvious, never predictable, never boring. Charlotte Rampling was brilliant, and so was the whole story... within the story!

Richmond Hill

A crisp riff on La Piscine (revisited yet again) with a generally engaging melie of eroticism, alter egos and blurry reality despite a rather tricksy ending. Rampling steels her way through the sometimes opaque script with a certain hand.