Swimming Pool is a wonderfully put together and cleverly executed little film that knows a Hell of a lot more than it initially lets on. It's a film all about perspective; about how we are presented with a text, how characters within the text see the world around them and how the world around them can be re-formed and manipulated in certain ways – it's a slow-burning, thrilling and quite sexy filtering of a reality through a protagonist's sub-conscience. The film is about authors, creative writers and creative minds and the place they go when in need of a new idea or story. In Swimming Pool, writer/director François Ozon creates a physical space for this lead in this predicament, but plays with us and this location to give us something quite special.<br /><br />The lead is Sarah Morton (Rampling), a successful author in the crime/detective genre who is having trouble coming up with an idea for her next novel. In order to clear her head and gain inspiration, she is transported to the South of France in the form of boss John Bosload's (Dance) large and secluded holiday home. But there's a hitch, and that is that John's young, fast and loose daughter named Julie (Sagnier) frequents it rather often thus causing friction, disagreement and general strife.<br /><br />When we first meet what we later find out to be a hugely successful author with many adoring fans and numerously successful books, there is a deliberately anti-climatic sense about the character. She inhabits a very public and very familiar setting in an underground tube train, but shuns attention and dismisses claims from one passenger she is the successful author she is accused of being. I suppose this inserts an opinion into the audience of a certain aura of loneliness or a 'want' to be cut off from most people in Rampling's character, and, given the film is about the want to be on one's own as they collect their thoughts; enables us to identify with Sarah before her trip to France. It also allows us to identify the changes she goes through when put up against her opposite in Julie, and how forced interaction with this 'type' of person forces a confrontation with typical feelings and emotions.<br /><br />Initially, London is shot in the manner you might expect from a Frenchman, what with shots of Big Ben, the London Eye and the Houses of Parliment but I think the inclusion of these things is more about getting across the sense of the familiar; of the everyday and, ultimately, of the mundane. This is clashed with the manner in which Ozon shoots France, as this wonderfully warm, calm and colourful rural patch of land in which Sarah will spend her time. But the jump, again, is substantial enough in the sense this new and strange place Sarah is inhabiting is not only her physical place of rest but acts as an enclave within her mind; a place in which ideas and fantasies are allowed to cook up and play out. The character of Julie acts as an interesting but ever so-vital piece to the text. The film feigns as if it is a battle of young vs. old; of tradition vs. 'new wave' or any other such contemporary term you might like to apply to Julie. One is a lot younger, more energetic and very much enjoys company, specifically of the male variety and specifically for the length of a single evening. Sarah can only look on in a very mixed, but very well put across via Rampling, sense of confusion, despair and disgust.<br /><br />Onto Sarah's 'look' in the film, something Ozon pays specific attention to when Julie is engaging in what makes her what she is. There is a point, early on, in which Julie swims naked but the film does not offer a reaction shot on Sarah's behalf thus defusing any gaze. Later on, when she makes love to one of a few random men she finds during her nights out, Sarah cannot hep but become interested and observes in the same composition before later still, there actually is a reaction shot from Sarah, during another sex act in the house's swimming pool from which the title derives. The events could have two implications, but going into specifics would spoil the piece. Needless to say, it may be a coming to terms with one's identity but additionally a sort of perverted escalation as Sarah lets loose her mind and envisages fantasies as her writer's block is lifted.<br /><br />The film progresses into a final act that genuinely caught me unawares, specifically due to the way in which it branched out into a murder plot, something that Sarah herself is used to writing so successfully, only this time we do not see things play out from a detective's point of view. Swimming Pool is very articulate in its approach, giving us this somewhat downbeat lead and having them undergo an odyssey that might not quite be reality as we know it but almost certainly plays out on some level, psychological or physical otherwise.