La Piscine (1969)
Directed by Jacques Deray

Film Review

La Piscine was Jacques Deray's breakthrough film, the first in a series of glossy box office hits that placed him in the first rank of successful French mainstream filmmakers throughout the 1970s.  Deray had made half a dozen films prior to this - mostly routine thrillers such as Rififi à Tokyo (1963) and Avec la peau des autres (1966) - but La Piscine is where his career began properly, his first of nine collaborations with the now internationally renowned French film star, Alain Delon.  The next film that Deray and Delon made together, Borsalino (1970), was a smash hit that established Deray as a leading director in the popular policier/gangster genre.  Delon's subsequent work with Deray includes some of his best films - Flic Story (1975), Trois hommes à abattre (1980) and Un Crime (1993).

La Piscine isn't quite the kind of thriller we now generally associate with Jacques Deray.  It is more a psychological drama, a low key chamber-piece involving (for the most part) four characters indulging in a polite game of sexual one-upmanship.  The titular swimming pool is not only an essential part of the set - most of the action takes place in or around it; it is also a stark metaphor for illicit sex, inviting but deadly.  For the first half of the film, the characters resist the magnetic pull of the pool, but one by one they are lured into it, yielding to inevitable forces, those subconscious desires that govern all our destinies.  If it is anything, La Piscine is a study in human beings' susceptibility to their hidden vices.  We are all pawns in Nature's game of psychological chess.

The film begins in a deceptively languorous and sensual vein, suggestive of a tawdry piece of erotica.  In a synthetic recreation of the Garden of Eden, we see a bronzed, muscular Alain Delon basking in the summer heat in the company of an even more photogenic and seductive Romy Schneider.  The fact that Delon and Schneider had, the previous decade, been real-life lovers is a tease that Deray exploits fully.  Their chemistry is such that the air seems to buzz with an electric charge whenever they are on screen together - they make a truly iconic screen couple.   As this delectable duo lounge around the pool, lazily caressing each other's toned bodies and occasionally sneaking off to indulge their harmless fetishistic urges (with bits of foliage), they appear to have found a state of perfect harmony, such as we imagine existed before the Fall of Man.  The arrival of two unwelcome interlopers - Schneider's handsome ex-partner Maurice Ronet and his sexy teenage daughter Jane Birkin - soon puts paid to all that and it isn't long before the sexual dynamics of a quaint ménage à quatre begin to tear this fragile recreated Eden to pieces.

There is such a dearth of plot to this film that you scarcely notice it.  What makes La Piscine so compelling and meaningful are the characters and how they play off one another in what the French term a huis clos situation, like fire-crackers in a heated oven.  At first, Birkin appears to be the most innocent of the four.  She is the one who is most reluctant to set foot in the fabricated paradise and the one who is most wary of the pool's corrupting allure.  As the other three characters awkwardly interact, exchanging banalities whilst nurturing and suppressing the most destructive of desires, Birkin stays in the background, aloof and disconnected from the brewing sexual intrigue.

As soon as she moves into the foreground, Birkin (more magnetic and seductive than Bardot ever was) becomes the key player in the drama - the catalyst that makes inevitable the horrific resolution to the Delon-Ronet rivalry.  Far from being an innocent, Birkin emerges as a symbol of malignancy, the serpent that no Garden of Eden should be without.  It is no accident that Delon's deflowering of Birkin takes place off-screen.  This would have shown us too much too early.  It is only after Ronet is out of the frame that it becomes evident that Birkin was the one doing the seducing, giving Delon his first taste of the forbidden fruit that would make him capable of murder.

That Delon hates Ronet is apparent from the moment they first appear on screen.  We're not taken in by the pretence of politeness for one second.  Delon resents Ronet's success, both in his work and in his relationships with the opposite sex, and he clearly sees him as a dangerous rival.  It is tempting to make an easy comparison with René Clément's Plein soleil (1960).  In the earlier film, Delon (cinema's most talented Mr Ripley) seeks to steal Ronet's identity and independence.  In La Piscine, he just wants to erase him, to abolish the threat to his male superiority.

By killing Ronet, Delon claims Eden for himself, but in doing so he places himself entirely in the power of his appointed Eve, a supremely inscrutable Romy Schneider.  It is in Schneider's gift to have Delon ejected from Eden.  She has the evidence that will betray him to the police and have him guillotined for murder.  But in fact she has no choice, either to pardon or condemn.   Like Delon, she is completely at the mercy of her primitive urges - she is bound to protect her mate.  The film ends with order restored to Paradise and the strangers banished, but things are not as they once were.  Eve has triumphed over her Adam - she is the dominant sex, he is content in his submission.  All is perfect - until another Maurice Ronet dares to show up.

With its strongly Hitchcockian associations, La Piscine bears more than a passing resemblance to similar films made around this time by Deray's Nouvelle Vague contemporary Claude Chabrol - Les Biches (1968), La Femme infidèle (1969), Juste avant la nuit (1971).  There is a distinctly Chabrolian texture to the cast of characters - complacent bourgeois types who inhabit a moral vacuum that makes them prone to guilt-free bouts of criminality and other social misdemeanours.  But whereas Chabrol's tone is usually one of mocking condemnation, Deray's is more one of gentle complicity.  He wants us to identify with his four protagonists and recognise something of ourselves within them.  Rarely do we fully engage with or even like Chabrol's protagonists, and often we are revolted by them.  The fact that Deray's handsome foursome are played by four of French cinema's most alluring actors makes it impossible for us to resist their charms.

And it is crucial that we do fall for each of the four main characters, for so much of the drama plays out under the surface.  The dialogue is sparse, so banal that it hardly seems to express anything.  "One always has a preference for things that are without value", Birkin observes in one of her more profound moments of facile chatter.  It is left to Deray's shamelessly voyeuristic camera lens to tell the real story, to capture the subtle gestures and looks that show what the characters are feeling and thinking.

Right up until the film's cataclysmic moment, there is a distinct lack of activity on screen, yet we can hardly fail to sense the tensions gradually building within, the little fire smouldering in the corner that has the potential to turn into a raging inferno.  Deray's masterfully restrained mise-en-scène (this is surely his best work), assisted by Jean-Jacques Tarbès' stylish photography and some acting of the most exquisite subtlety from an exemplary cast, makes La Piscine a definitive work of 1960s French cinema - and a frighteningly perceptive examination of the human psyche.

Film Synopsis

Jean-Paul, a failed writer turned advertising executive, is enjoying a month's holiday at a Saint-Tropez villa, in the company of Marianne, his partner of two years' standing.  The couple's idyllic summer repose is disturbed by the sudden arrival of Harry Lannier, a former lover of Marianne's, and his 18-year-old daughter Penelope.  A thriving record producer, Harry is everything that Jean-Paul is not - extrovert, successful and happy.  Harry gladly accepts Marianne's invitation to spend a few days at the villa but what begins as an amiable reunion soon takes on a darker hue.  As Harry and Marianne's former feelings for one another begin to reassert themselves, Jean-Paul finds himself irresistibly drawn to Penelope.  One night, Harry returns to the villa in a drunken state and starts to taunt his rival.  When Harry falls into the villa's swimming pool, Jean-Paul prevents him from climbing out and concludes by drowning him and then making it appear that his death was an accident.  Jean-Paul manages to deceive Marianne but not police inspector Lévêque, who is convinced that Harry was murdered...