{"id":254,"date":"2004-01-30T17:01:50","date_gmt":"2004-01-30T21:01:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=254"},"modified":"2004-01-30T17:01:50","modified_gmt":"2004-01-30T21:01:50","slug":"swimming-pool","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=254","title":{"rendered":"Swimming Pool"},"content":{"rendered":"

Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool<\/em><\/a>, like his earlier Under The Sand<\/em><\/a>, takes an empathetic view of a middle-aged woman, played by the great Charlotte Rampling.
\nAt the start of the film, Rampling’s character is brooding, angry, and repressed. She’s a successful crime novelist who finds herself a victim of writer’s block. And the film is both an allegory of the writing process, and a psychological thriller somewhat reminiscent of Polanski (in this respect, it reminded me a bit of one of Ozon’s earlier films, See the Sea<\/em><\/a>).
\nAt first, Swimming Pool<\/em> is all nuance: Rampling’s gestures and pauses, her body language and facial expressions. Gradually, a story emerges on the screen, just as one does in the pages Rampling’s novelist character types out on her laptop. A strange tension develops between Rampling and another, much younger woman, as stereotypically French as Rampling’s character here is stereotypically English.
\nThe film becomes an exploration of spaces and boundaries: of relations of intimacy and violation, suspicion and trust, between the two women. This gradually becomes something more, a complicity at once creepy and liberating; then it dissolves – or metamorphoses – into something quite different, as the stubborn, violent unreason of intractable fantasy gives way (or gives birth?) to the pliable, pacified objectivity of a finished work of art.
\nSwimming Pool<\/em> is a grippingly mysterious film, less on account of the surprises of its plot twists, than because of Ozon’s and Rampling’s portrayal of the impalpable, the unsayable and unshowable, the in-between.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Francois Ozon’s Swimming Pool<\/em><\/a>, like his earlier Under The Sand<\/em><\/a>, takes an empathetic view of a middle-aged woman, played by the great Charlotte Rampling.
\nAt the start of the film, Rampling’s character is brooding, angry, and repressed. She’s a successful crime novelist who finds herself a victim of writer’s block. And the film is both an allegory of the writing process, and a psychological thriller somewhat reminiscent of Polanski (in this respect, it reminded me a bit of one of Ozon’s earlier films, See the Sea<\/em><\/a>).
\nAt first, Swimming Pool<\/em> is all nuance: Rampling’s gestures and pauses, her body language and facial expressions. Gradually, a story emerges on the screen, just as one does in the pages Rampling’s novelist character types out on her laptop. A strange tension develops between Rampling and another, much younger woman, as stereotypically French as Rampling’s character here is stereotypically English.
\nThe film becomes an exploration of spaces and boundaries: of relations of intimacy and violation, suspicion and trust, between the two women. This gradually becomes something more, a complicity at once creepy and liberating; then it dissolves – or metamorphoses – into something quite different, as the stubborn, violent unreason of intractable fantasy gives way (or gives birth?) to the pliable, pacified objectivity of a finished work of art.
\nSwimming Pool<\/em> is a grippingly mysterious film, less on account of the surprises of its plot twists, than because of Ozon’s and Rampling’s portrayal of the impalpable, the unsayable and unshowable, the in-between.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}