Movies into Film
Swimming Pool
Directed by Francois Ozon
France/UK, 2003
Swim, Swim, Sweet Charlotte
Rampling walks the walk (Photo: Focus Features)
It should come as no shock that François Ozon’s Swimming Pool is high-toned trash. After 8 Women and Under the Sand, would you anticipate anything less? A few scenes flicker and spark: Charlotte Rampling, who plays a mystery writer, gets sudden itches of inspiration for the new book she’s working on, and Rampling takes such great pleasure in these flashes of synaptic shutter-bugging that she momentarily lifts the movie from its quagmire of smirky, self-satisfied old bait-and-switch tricks.
Ozon is a curious one: he’s a women’s director who hates women. Rampling, in her second film with him, clearly trusts Ozon. At age 57, well past her physical prime, she’s confident to be photographed full frontal. In the service of what, however? On the heels of a crucial scene at her publisher’s office, Ozon undercuts Rampling’s triumph with a near-replica of the duddy denouement from Under the Sand. A pity, because Rampling is excellent as a repressed prude who slowly comes around to trying new things, such as dancing with the Gallic stud whom she sizes up daily at an outdoor café. Her looks may be mostly gone, yet she smolders still. Rampling does her most captivating work since Woody Allen’s woefully underrated satire Stardust Memories, and she makes this summer sleaze worth simmering through.
July 2003
In The Sea (Photo: Palm Pictures)
Directed by Baltasar Kormakur
Not a Drop to Drink
Titled The Sea, this Icelandic import takes place (save for an underwater sex scene) entirely on land, and the movie, far from recalling the contemplative imagery that its name implies, is one long, extended, nearly deafening screech.
It is also pure soap opera. A family reunites, old feuds flare, and an inferno combusts. The particulars aren’t worth recounting. Just know to expect sterling observations along the lines of “You can’t freeze love like a gutted fish.” And from a young woman starved for incestuous amoré with her first cousin: “At night I chew my way through my quilt, and then I wake up covered with feathers.” Clearly, down comforters have their drawbacks.
The few choice nuggets to spill out of the screenwriter’s impoverished imagination hail from the clan’s obstreperously cranky grandmother, an old crone who responds to a visitor’s request for cola with “…in Hell, demons pour Coke over the parched gums of the damned.” The Sea doesn’t get much more ebullient than that.
May 2003
Chaos
Directed by Coline Serreau
France, 2003
Rachida Brakni and Catherine Frot in Chaos (Photo: New Yorker Films)
Early on in Chaos, Coline Serreau’s exhilarating feminist thriller, Hélène, an affluent, mid-life professional, helps her piggish husband to dodge an unwanted visit from his well-meaning, walnut oil enthusiast mother. Moments later, Hélène (Catherine Frot) pays a surprise call to her teenage son’s apartment, only to be hidden from in turn, and thus jolted out of hypocrisy. It’s an ingeniously devised awakening sequence, and Frot’s vague resemblance to Hillary Clinton adds an electric refrain to the roundelay of cover-up and betrayal.
A tightly constructed and thought-provoking revenge fantasy, Chaos traces the bond between Hélène and a badly beaten young prostitute Noémie, whose assault Hélène witnessed. Hélène becomes obsessed with Noémie’s recovery to the point of abandoning job and family for a hospital cot. Frot has some extraordinary moments: drunkenly babbling about cell phones to a bartender, bathing in a fountain, and (once she’s discovered the joys of playing detective) stealthily whacking a pimp with a beam of wood. Humiliation cinema tends to linger on sadomasochistic reaction shots; Chaos doesn’t. Writer-director Serreau hits her targets then—as do the women she portrays—swiftly moves on. – NPT
July 2003
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com