Lucky Charm
If you've ever been eating a bowl of cereal only to realize that, in the last couple of spoonfuls, you're chewing on the enclosed prize, you'll have some idea what watching Swimming Pool is like. The movie features one of those "gotcha" endings that leaves you with the choice of A) swallowing something artificial and plastic, not really meant for consumption or B) spitting the secret decoder ring back out and deciphering messages which were more interesting when they were partially a secret. But perhaps this is making too much of the film's last five minutes. By and large, Swimming Pool is like most cereals: dessert passing itself off as nutrition. You can have your Lucky Charms and eat them, too.

"I am not the person you think I am." These are the first words we hear from Sarah Morton, a spinsterish British writer of Christie-esque whodunits. She's feeling bludgeoned by her own success (the line just quoted is her dishonest brush-off of an eager fan), and she goes to her publisher to complain about the stagnation of her career. Less interesting actresses would have wrung sympathy from this mid-life crisis; Charlotte Rampling gives Sarah a tersely unflattering ferocity. She seethes with too much rage to have many regrets. Her relationship with her publisher John is obviously more than professional, although just how much more is left productively unspecified.

To coax the next Inspector Dorwell novel from his meal ticket, John sends Sarah to his vacation house in France. It's sunny there, and the markets are replete with fatty dairy products and plush fruit. Sarah starts lightening up, the taut line of her mouth curling up by degrees at the corners, and begins working on the new book. Director Francois Ozon makes this transformation enticing, although were this the entire film, it would be a lot like that Itchy and Scratchy where they drink lemonade on the porch. Squeak, squeak go the rocking chairs.

Shapely Daughter
Dramatic tension arrives in the shapely form of John's French daughter Julie. She rattles the peace and quiet Sarah needs to work by splashing about in the pool of the title, and bagging a different man every night. These activities require her to spend a lot of time topless. Given the demands of the role, Ludivine Sagnier is, how you say, far from miscast. Sarah's scandalized at first, but finds herself succumbing to the vicarious thrills of Julie's exploits. She starts another book on her laptop, and one suspects it's considerably less tweedy than her detective fiction. (A waiter in Sarah's lunch hangout helpfully informs us that the Marquis de Sade's castle is not far away.)

This is all enjoyable in an "All My Children" sort of way. The movie sometimes has larger ambitions than this, but seems too lazy and/or horny to manage more than a gesture in their general direction. Early on, Sarah and Julie have a conversation about the swimming pool that should have "WARNING: SYMBOLIC IMPORT" flashing at the bottom in scarlet letters. More often, though, the conflict between the outlooks of these characters is subtler, to the point that one suspects there isn't really any conflict at all. Julie and Sarah keep insisting there is, and eventually a corpse turns up as verification. We're left to wonder whether Sarah's writing Julie's story, or if it's the other way around.

The posters and reviewers have been billing this as a noirish sort of thriller, when in fact it's more of a character study. Which brings us to the ending I can't really talk about without ruining the movie. (Never mind that the movie's ending threatens to ruin it without me.) Sarah gives John a different book than the one he expected, and we're meant to think that this is the result of a transformation in her inner life. Or is it? The exchange of fictions rings a little hollow, the very bloody meanness the film purports to decry gussied up as female empowerment. Flirting with profundities about the relationship between life and art, Swimming Pool ultimately sticks to the shallow end. It is, nevertheless, an alluring respite from the overbearing gee-whizzery of the usual summer fare, and may prompt some interesting post-matinee discussions in spite of itself.