Jacques Deray (1969)
Jacques Deray’s erotic psychological thriller has lived on in various ways. Michel Legrand’s Oscar-winning score for Summer of ’42 (1971) unmistakably echoes – in the main theme’s four-note phrase, and variations on it – his music for La Piscine. François Ozon’s Swimming Pool (2003) is another tale of sex and death with the same title. Luca Guadagnino’s A Bigger Splash (2016) is a remake of Deray’s story. In between those two films, Christian Dior successfully advertised their men’s fragrance ‘Eau sauvage’ with shots from La Piscine featuring Alain Delon.
Ceci Peng, a film writer and curator, introduced this BFI screening. Peng’s introduction was informative and organised yet rather puzzling. She placed La Piscine in its national political context: it was shot (on location in Ramatuelle, in southeastern France) just a few weeks after the turbulence of May ’68. She listed the film’s emblems of incipient globalisation: swimsuits designed by André Courrèges; a Maserati sports car; American pre-packaged ingredients for a Chinese meal, bought at a French convenience store. She explained, and admitted how much she’d enjoyed researching, La Piscine‘s mouth-watering topicality. First, the intersection of the lives of the beautiful people on and beyond the screen: the main characters are a couple played by stars – Delon and Romy Schneider – who had famously been a real-life couple. Second, the ramifying scandal of the ‘Marković affair’, centred around the mysterious death of Delon’s bodyguard, which occurred while La Piscine was in production. Third and even hotter off the press, the more amusing sensation of the Jane Birkin-Serge Gainsbourg number ‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’, released in France just a few weeks before La Piscine, in which Birkin co-stars with Delon, Schneider and Maurice Ronet.
Peng had little to say, though, about the film’s substance. Of course, experts giving introductions at BFI need to tread a careful line between saying too little and too much: fifteen years on, I still remember the audience uproar that overwhelmed Philip Kemp’s intro to Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest – some people objecting that Kemp was giving the plot away, others telling the objectors to mind their manners. Even so, it was hard to understand why Peng concentrated almost entirely on peripheral elements – hard to understand, that is, until La Piscine got underway. In terms of incident and human interaction, there’s not a lot going on in the film.
This is only partly a consequence of the Saint-Tropez setting, where it’s too relentlessly hot and sunny for the main characters, Jean-Paul (Delon) and Marianne (Schneider), to do much more than swim in the pool, sunbathe beside it and sleep in their holiday villa. The location is certainly away from it all: the remoteness of May ’68 to what’s on the screen is striking – Jacques Deray and Jean-Claude Carrière, who wrote the screenplay with him, are prescient about how immediately forgettable the workers’ strikes and student demonstrations proved to be in French life (even if they’ve stayed in the national memory in the longer term). The proletariat is entirely absent from La Piscine except for Jean-Paul and Marianne’s affable, efficient housekeeper (Suzy Jaspard). French youth is represented by Penelope (Birkin) – who comes to the villa with her father Harry (Ronet) – and, at a party there one evening, by a teenage boy (Thierry Chabert) who talks at Penelope and soon bores her silly.
Creature comforts rule. Jean-Paul, a serious writer manqué, now makes a good living in advertising. Harry, Jean-Paul’s friend and Marianne’s former lover, is a successful producer in the music industry. As Ceci Peng pointed out and Jean-Jacques Tarbès’ cinematography instantly confirms, La Piscine is much concerned with visual textures and surfaces. Harry and Penelope’s arrival is bound to disturb the luxurious indolence of the main couple’s holiday. It’s soon plain to see that Harry and Marianne still have feelings for each other – he more than she – and that Jean-Paul has his eye on Penelope. When he and Marianne are still on their own, they fool about in the pool; once Harry’s around, the two men have a swimming race. Deray soon establishes the tensions in the atmosphere but doesn’t develop this much throughout a big chunk of screen time.
La Piscine bursts into dramatic life in the film’s one death, when Jean-Paul drowns Harry in the swimming pool – an exceptionally convincing description of an unpremeditated murder. The two men have a poolside argument and come to blows but this isn’t set to be a fight to the death. It’s only when Harry, who’s had plenty to drink, swings at Jean-Paul, loses his balance and falls into the pool, that things take an unexpectedly lethal turn. He calls out to Jean-Paul for a helping hand (perhaps even intending to use this as a sneaky way of pulling him in). Instead, Jean-Paul pushes Harry’s head beneath the water. He seems to do it just to express annoyance but, when Harry resurfaces, he does it again – then keeps doing it until Harry stays under. At first, Jean-Paul conceals the crime from everyone. After they’ve both been interviewed by a suspicious police detective (Paul Crauchet), Jean-Paul tells Marianne what happened – a confession which is also startling. It’s a bewildered yet remarkably accurate account of what the viewer saw happening: ‘He wanted to hit me. Then he fell in – alone. All by himself. Then I don’t know what happened to me. I went crazy. … I didn’t let him come out of the water’.
Apart from these two brilliant sequences, nearly everything in La Piscine – before the pivotal murder and after – feels too drawn out, including the police investigation that doesn’t achieve much, except to leave Jean-Paul and Marianne rattled and fearful for the future. Thanks chiefly to its photogenic cast, the film is, of course, continuously eye-catching. The flawless bodies and faces of Romy Schneider and Alain Delon are scrutinised admiringly by Deray’s camera, especially in the early stages. Those faces evolve strikingly over the course of the film: late on, both are rigid with anxiety. Schneider is more interesting once things have turned bad; until then, she’s somewhat bland. Delon, in contrast, is amusing from the start, as Jean-Paul lies supine on his sun lounger and, expending the minimum physical effort, manages to drain the contents of his glass of crème de menthe frappé without spilling a drop. Later on, a couple of Delon’s nervous reactions seem too theatrical but he gives a good performance overall. So does Maurice Ronet: Harry’s well-fed bonhomie always seems uneasy, particularly his tense rictus grin. Jane Birkin is an amazing image but it’s just as well that we’re told Penelope – the result of a youthful fling on her father’s part – has an English mother, who can be blamed for Birkin’s still awkward French accent.
23 July 2025