A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Warning: The following post will spoil most of the plot of La Piscine. While it’s not necessarily a film to be watched for the twists and turns of the plot, be warned if you haven’t seen the film.

Really, it should be obvious: Maurice Ronet should stay well away from Alain Delon, and that goes double if they’re anywhere near water. The first time I saw the two of them together in a film (in Purple Noon, the French adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley), Delon’s Tom Ripley stabbed Philippe Greenleaf (played by Ronet) to death and tried to sink him to the bottom of the ocean. Let’s just say that Ronet doesn’t fare much better in La Piscine, and again, it’s Delon that dunnit. Apparently, the two were close friends, but if I’d been Ronet, I would have been very careful around the former when there’s a camera running anywhere nearby and when there’s water in the picture.

Actually, watching Jacques Deray’s La Piscine (1969), I found myself with a severe case of déjà vu in more than one way. I knew the story I was watching, without ever having seen the film: a couple on vacation in a hot country, spending a lot of their time lounging at the pool; a former lover of the woman stops by with his young, attractive daughter (well, I say ‘attractive’ – I’ll return to this later); jealousy, dick-measuring contests and hijinks ensue. A couple of years ago I’d seen Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash, which Wikipedia says is “loosely based” on Deray’s film, but really, it’s a remake, and in terms of what happens it is very faithful to the original. If you’re watching films mainly for the plot, you’ve pretty much seen La Piscine if you’ve watched Guadagnino’s 2015 film.

But, as I’ve said, La Piscine isn’t necessarily to be watched for its plot first and foremost. It’s an overused term, especially on the social media hellscape formerly known as Twitter, but for most of its running time La Piscine is about its vibe – and that vibe is hot, sweaty, languid and, how might they put it on Twitter? Horny AF. The central couple of the film, the failed writer Jean-Paul and his lover Marianne, are played by Delon and Romy Schneider, and while the two were no longer romantically linked at the time La Piscine was made, the sexual tension between the two of them is palpable. Those people on the internet complaining about how there’s too much sex in movies? They’d probably be reaching for their smelling salts just watching the first five minutes of the film. For anyone trying to argue that cinema is all about voyeurism, this film would definitely be on the evidence list.

Having said that: against expectations, La Piscine isn’t just two hours of male gaze. Apart from one or two scenes (one an almost comically misjudged shot cutting from a fast car to Romy Schneider lying naked on a floofy white bedspread – it’s the ’60s, people, and it seems that Deray really liked those early scenes of Brigitte Bardot in Godard’s Contempt), the camera loves, or at least lusts after, Delon as much as it does Schneider, even if the equation is somewhat thrown out of whack once Jean-Paul’s frenemy and Marianne’s former lover Harry (Ronet) enters the picture with his nubile daughter Penelope. Pen is played by Jane Birkin (who died earlier this year) and her attractiveness is of a very different kind from Marianne’s: Birkin was 23 when La Piscine was filmed, but mentally and emotionally her character still seems to be a child. She’s presented as something of a nymphet of a very ’60s, early ’70s kind, but she’s also very much a screen onto which the other characters project their anxieties and their neediness. As a character she is no match for the others, especially not for Marianne, a woman who has clear ideas about what, and who, she wants. But in the end it isn’t Marianne, Harry or Pen that determine what happens: it is Jean-Paul and his insecurities that are in the driver’s seat.

Verdict: La Piscine is very much a film about desire. It isn’t a film about love. This is an erotic thriller, not a romantic one. And this is key to the way the film segues from sweaty heat into something much more feverish and finally downright chilly – another way in which this makes for a good match with Purple Noon. Delon’s Jean-Paul may not be Tom Ripley all grown up, but Delon and Ronet definitely work very well as men pretending to be friends, while underneath the surface rivalry, desire, wants and need bubble away until the pressure has built up too much. (The two actors also collaborated in a handful of other films, including the political thriller Death of a Corrupt Man and the war actioner Lost Command.)

While I’m not entirely taken with Birkin’s character and her acting in La Piscine (it’s difficult to say whether my problem is the performance or rather the passive, childlike character – in either case, her allure in this remains a mystery to me), there’s no doubt that the cast as a whole is on top form. Ronet’s Harry is perfect as the kind of friend that uses his glib, aggressive charm to cover up his misanthropy and deeply toxic need, and Delon and Schneider shine, both early in the film when it’s just the two of them so much in lust with one another that we as the audience feel we’re intruding on their intimacy, and later when their relationship cracks under the strain of Harry’s presence. Arguably, Schneider is both one of La Piscine‘s main assets and one of its most frustrating elements: she draws the audience’s attention as much as her character draws the attention of the men around her, but Marianne nonetheless ends up a supporting player in Jean-Paul’s drama. This is something that Guadagnino’s remake arguably improves on, and it’s difficult not to wish for the script to spend more time on Marianne in the film’s last third – though Schneider definitely finds ways, through hesitations, glances and gestures, to hint at more going on inside the character than the script itself suggests. However, even if Schneider may be somewhat shortchanged by the material she’s working with, La Piscine works tremendously well as the stylish, erotic and finally chilling psychological thriller it is. Perhaps Ronet should be wary of Delons in hot climes – but the audience is definitely in fine, if rather sweaty, hands.