La piscine

Ignore the Naysayers, "La Pacine" is a masterful film. A true example of the kind of film they only really made in that area: vibrant and glossy, where a voyeuristic camera just hovers and lingers, putting the viewer right there. It reminded me a lot of Jean-Luc Godard's "Contempt." The way it is filmed makes the viewer want to be in that world, and stay there as long as possible. I know that South France in 1960's seems a hell of lot better than our world today. If "La Pacine" was 3 hours long, I would still sit through it, just to BE there.

I found the acting performances to be extraordinary. So much in this film is conveyed through body language and facial expressions, that one hardly even needs to know French (or read subtitles) to understand what it happening. Romy Schneider and Jane Birkin are both great to look at, and I thought Jane Birkin in particular really did well to say a lot with few words.

The only thing that slightly drags "La Pacine" down is that it's slightly overlong in the drawn out expository section after the climax, which causes the film to loose a bit of punch by the end. So come hang out by the pool for a while, I don't think you'll regret it.

I saw it few times with the nostalgia of the great first scenes. A film about love, hate, jealousy, games and death . Admirable work of Romy Schneider and Alain Delon and great craft of the nuances of story. And, sure, a young Jane Birkin , seductive and well acting.

Maybe, the remarkable good point remains the dialogue and the ambiguous games of characters. Sure, a classic , with its obvious virtuous but, more important, with few sins who, after a half of century are very near to the status of virtues.

A good cast and a fairs slice of thriller. And the summer proper reflected in the water of pool.

The most simple is to say : see it ! Not for story but for emotions inspired by a fist of scenes.

And what eye candy - Alain Delon.

"La Piscine" is about two impossibly beautiful people in various stages of undress having a lot of foreplay. Or so it seems. Jean- Paul (Delon) and his lover (or wife, not sure) Marianne (Romy Schneider) are vacationing in a friend's mansion in Saint-Tropez. Lots of sun, making out, and swimming.

Marianne's ex-beau, Harry (Maurice Ronet) calls to say he's in the area, and Marianne invites him and his nubile daughter Penelope (Jane Birkin) to stay with him.

It's obvious that Harry still desires Marianne, so there is automatic tension. Then Jean-Paul seduces Penelope. Soon tension leads to something worse.

"La Piscine" is a typical foreign film - the ideas are sometimes obtuse, and it moves slowly. It's also too long by as much as a half hour. It's hard to concentrate on the plot because the beauty of the stars, Delon and Schneider, and their incredible chemistry overwhelm the story - to the extent that one doesn't really understand Jean- Paul's attraction to Penelope.

What erupts is the suppressed anger of the once-suicidal Jean-Paul, the competitiveness between him and Harry, and Harry's jealous possession of his daughter, whom he only recently met. As Penelope says, he likes to have her travel with him because people often think she's his mistress.

Schneider and Delon were a famous real-life couple but had broken up about five years earlier. Their chemistry is undeniable, and it's heartbreaking to think about what happened to her. Both actors give very "movie" performances - nothing overplayed, many subtle, nonverbal reactions. All of the acting is good, and the conflict scene between Harry and Jean-Paul is excellent.

"La Piscine" is considered a classic, but I believe many Americans had a hard time with it due to its languid pace and a tendency to look for action rather than psychology. Enjoy it for the beautiful photography and beautiful actors, if nothing else.

The movie is languid and superficial and slow-moving but that's generally fine, if you feel like revisiting one of those archetypal, now almost forgotten, mildly (extremely mildly) titillating flicks which used to show up (dubbed) in the Adults Only slot on Friday late-night British TV in the late seventies. The earlier sequences glisten with tanned flesh, against which the slowly building tensions (Ronet and Schneider's past affair; Delon's attraction toward the daughter; Delon's relative failure as a writer and his realization that Ronet doesn't really like him) sometimes seem almost resonant. The movie becomes merely formulaic once it has to tie up the strands of the murder though - the only question being whether Schneider will stay with Delon or not, and it's clear at the end that this amounts to little more than the flip of a coin. Neither the writing nor the acting in the later stretches is sufficient to make very much out of this game of psychological cat and mouse.

This film about surface and inner passion (derangement, fear, etc...obviously symbolized by the pool) is a pleasure, mostly through the performances of Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. Most of the plot lies under the surface and there are many scenes where one must read between the lines to understand where everything will lead to. Okay, the film could have been a bit shorter, but the actors in my opinion really make up for it. We've seen everything now in the movies - but still, the opening sequence is one of the hottest scenes ever filmed. I cannot explain, see it yourself.