18/05/2003

François Ozon is a past master at manipulation, and he consolidated his reputation for playing games with the audience with his latest offering, Swimming Pool [+see also:
trailer
film profile], screened in competition on 18 May.
The sixth feature film by the man who gave us 8 Women [+see also:
trailer
film profile] begins as a psychological treatise that gradually transforms itself into a full-blown crime story and it sees the return of two of Ozon’s pet actresses, Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier.
Swimming Pool is set in a villa in the South of France inhabited by a cold and unfeeling woman novelist with writer’s block and a brazen young woman. An explosive contrast. Literally.
Under the director's watchful eye, the two actresses give a magnificent performance: “I love boxing my characters in and then observing them rather like a biologist studying creatures,” said Ozon.
Swimming pool is a film that can be read on at least two levels, it mixes fiction with reality in a creative process that Ozon compares to “drawing inspiration from reality and then sucking it dry”
Press reaction to the film was divided. Ozon’s genre-switching film is also the first time a film of his was selected for competition in Cannes, and it consolidates his international standing. The film was made in English and produced by Ozon’s habitual at Fidélité Productions, with the UK’s Headforce contributing 20 per cent of the total Euros6.1m budget. It will be interesting to see how French audiences react to Swimming Pool when it’s released domestically on 21 May.

(Translated from French)