French director Ozon must be clocking up all the work hours of a bee with problems at home. Mere months after the frivolous, highly camp 8 Women, he returns with this intriguing thriller. This is his first English language film, which explains the touristy images of the London based scenes (Big Ben, red buses) and the initial stereotypical nature of the central female characters. However, like most things in this absorbing drama, the women are not exactly as they seem.
Sarah Morton (Rampling) is an ageing, emotionally repressed fiction writer straight out of the beige section in Marks and Spencers. Feeling blocked by her latest detective novel, she accepts the use of her publisher’s (Dance) villa in the South of France but her peace is interrupted by the unannounced arrival of his19-year-old tits-out daughter Julie (Sagnier), a certified slapper fond of staggering home drunk with strange blokes and fucking them as loudly as possible. The only thing stiff near Sarah though, is her upper-lip, and she watches this free-spirit with envy and disgust at first, then voyeuristic fascination. Cue diary reading, and lots of lingering shots of nubile flesh.

Then, just as you’re trying to figure out if this is a detailed study of the process of identification, a metaphor for Anglo-French relations or whether you’ve wandered into Barely Legal: The Movie by mistake – the whole film twists into Hitchcockian mode. Suddenly, the personalities are more textured – Rampling is no longer the cold fish, and Sagnier is just a desperately fucked-up little girl who increasingly looks like Glenn Close in bunny-boiling mode.
Swimming Pool’s suspenseful proceedings provide a neat variation on the stranger-arrives, everything-changes formula, so common to French cinema. Though the film’s denoument is somewhat unsatisfying, super-charged performances and the whiff of blood and sex more than compensate, making this deliciously duplicitous and memorable viewing.