Film review

  • La Piscine

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

     

  • The Deadly Affair

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Sidney Lumet (1967)

    It’s hard to be sure with such a crummy, undistinctive title but I don’t think I’d heard of The Deadly Affair before it turned up on Talking Pictures this week.  To be fair to John le Carré, the title of his novel, on which the film is based, was better – Call for the Dead is even mildly intriguing.  Another significant name change occurred in the adaptation of the source material.  Call for the Dead, le Carré’s debut novel, introduces his best-known character, George Smiley, but Paramount acquired the screen rights to the name in the deal they struck with le Carré for The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965) even though Smiley is only a minor character in that story.  He’s the protagonist of Sidney Lumet’s picture, made by Columbia, in which he has become Charles Dobbs and is played by James Mason.  To be honest, extraneous details like these are more interesting than most of what’s on screen in The Deadly Affair but there are a few compensations.  The film now comes across as both typical of its time and a curiosity.

    The Deadly Affair’s date of release immediately suggests it was made on the back of the box-office success of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.  Paul Dehn wrote the screenplay for both films.  Each was directed by a respected Hollywood name whose recent work had fared well critically and/or commercially.  The Spy’s director, Martin Ritt, had made Hud (1963); the latest from the notably prolific Sidney Lumet included Long Day’s Journey into Night (1962), The Pawnbroker (1964) and The Hill (1965).  The Deadly Affair goes further than its predecessor in terms of high-profile international casting.  Except for Oskar Werner, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold’s main cast are native English speakers; The Deadly Affair has key roles for two recent Oscar winners, Maximilian Schell and Simone Signoret, as well as for one of Ingmar Bergman’s leading ladies, Harriet Andersson.  There are big-name contributors behind the camera and on the soundtrack, too:  cinematographer Freddie Young, who’d won Oscars for Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965); Quincy Jones, who wrote the score for Lumet’s film along with a ‘theme song’ performed by Astrud Gilberto, by now internationally famous for ‘The Girl from Ipanema’.

    The action takes place in contemporary London, where MI6 man Charles Dobbs investigates the sudden and unexpected death, apparently suicide, of Foreign Office civil servant Samuel Fennan (Robert Flemyng), an admitted former communist.  Fennan is dead by the end of a day that began for him in Hyde Park with what seemed a mutually positive meeting with Dobbs.  The latter’s suspicion that Fennan’s death isn’t what it seems is increased by an interview with Fennan’s widow, Nazi concentration camp survivor Elsa (Simone Signoret).  Although his bosses want Dobbs to drop the case, he unofficially teams up with Mendel (Harry Andrews), a Met police inspector, and they uncover a network of Eastern European agents.  Meanwhile, Dieter Frey (Maximilian Schell), with whom Dobbs worked during World War II, is in London on a visit from Switzerland.  Dobbs soon realises that Ann (Harriet Andersson), his promiscuous wife (forename unchanged from le Carré’s original), is having an affair with Frey.

    As usual in a John le Carré thriller, an involved plot is repeatedly interrupted by wordy speeches about the moral murkiness of post-war espionage, Britain’s decline in the shifting world order, and so on.  (I can’t certainly pin this on le Carré himself, having read only The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and some of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy but it’s a standard feature of screen adaptations of his work.)   In any case, the storyline yields few surprises.  It’s not only familiarity with Tinker Tailor that makes the identity of The Deadly Affair’s key villain, the mysterious ‘Sonntag’, very obvious.  First, Maximilian Schell surely wouldn’t have agreed to play Dieter Frey if he were little more than Ann’s latest love affair.  Second, as soon as Sonntag’s Swiss connections are mentioned, you know he must be Dieter Frey – doubling his betrayal of his old comrade-in-arms and Dobbs’ anguish at Frey’s treachery.  Frey is the forerunner of Bill Hayden in Tinker Tailor, a personal and a political traitor who has been screwing both Ann Smiley and his colleagues in British intelligence – but here’s another interesting fact.  Ann’s affair with Frey was Paul Dehn’s invention for the film.  It seems le Carré decided to make use of the dual betrayal idea when he set to work on Tinker Tailor.

    Sidney Lumet’s direction of the actors is slack.  James Mason, saddled with the spying’s-a-rotten-business jeremiads, nevertheless gives a decent performance but he’s not only too handsome for the role but also too theatrically dynamic in it.  (Alec Guinness casts a long shadow over Smileys or aka Smileys past and future.)  There are also times when Mason seems to lose concentration.  The supporting work of the home side is highly variable.  Kenneth Haigh is tiresomely animated as Dobbs’ colleague Appleby, Max Adrian characteristically witty as his boss, and Harry Andrews excellent as Mendel – he manages to combine eccentric details (Mendel falls asleep at the drop of a hat) with a convincing portrait of someone getting on capably with a challenging job.  The more exotic casting also yields mixed results.  Maximilian Schell is no more than OK.  Harriet Andersson, a great actress, is a disaster as Ann:  she doesn’t get the hang of the character, let alone of delivering lines in English.  Simone Signoret, another great actress, is superb as Fennan’s widow.  With quite limited screen time, Signoret creates a remarkably rich sense of the psychological legacy of Elsa’s unhappy past.

    The oddest feature of the film’s clumsy attempts to be a prestige international number is the involvement, announced in the opening credits, of ‘the Royal Shakespeare Company directed by Peter Hall’.  This comprises two sections inside the Aldwych Theatre.  The first, presumably a skit on ‘classical’ theatre (though an embarrassingly unfunny one), is a rehearsal for Macbeth.  Corin Redgrave is terrible as the impatient young director, his sister Lynn not as bad as a clueless, debby ASM.  For some reason, the three witches include Frank Williams (the vicar in Dad’s Army).  The second RSC episode, consisting of excerpts from Edward II with David Warner as the king, takes place as Elsa Fennan anxiously waits for Dieter Frey to join her in the stalls while Dobbs, Appleby and Mendel, further back in the auditorium, keep a close eye on Elsa and the seat next to hers.  It’s a bit insulting to Warner and his RSC colleagues (Michael Bryant, Charles Kay, Timothy West et al), who seem to be doing their best, to have them appear just in order to be upstaged by the spy story reaching its climax beyond the footlights.

    Few of the main characters get out of the film alive.  The Deadly Affair includes more than enough violence, especially the sequences where Adam Scarr (Roy Kinnear), a dodgy cockney car dealer who’s somehow mixed up in the spy network, gets punched and kicked, thrown down a flight of steps and pushed over the edge of a building to his death.  Quincy Jones’ score is promising – as a sub-John Barry composition – under the opening titles but it’s forgettably generic once the film proper is underway.  The mushy melody for Astrud Gilberto’s love-theme number seems to recur, usually without the vocals, every time Harriet Andersson’s Ann appears.  It’s like a musical stalker.

    19 July 2025

     

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