La Piscine

LA PISCINE   **1/2

Jacques Deray

1969

IDEA:  A couple's summer idyll in the south of France is disrupted by the arrival of the girlfriend's former flame and his 18-year-old daughter.

BLURB:  A decadent coastal villa with too much space for its inhabitants; bodies idling in estival torpor; copious pregnant silences and numbed gazes from behind glass; indeed, we’re in the self-consciously modernist territory of bourgeois ennui in La Piscine. Specifically, the bourgeois ennui of two supernaturally attractive French people played by Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, whose starched, iconized figures serve as synecdoches of the film’s sumptuous but largely vacuous visual allure. Positioned within Deray’s manicured, late-60s chic aesthetic, they’re more objects of sensual contemplation than multidimensional characters, at once embodying an ad-mass image of epicurean beauty and luxury and a banal idea of a vain, myopic social elite. La Piscine builds its drama from the interpersonal trouble that inevitably surfaces within their paradise, with Deray showing a special predilection for the unspoken tensions that thrum under placid stretches of summery repose. Yet the film’s languors are often more moribund than scintillating, the suspense falling slack within a rote schema of sexual jealousy, narcissism, and becalmed amorality. La Piscine is consistently snazzy in its lensing, costuming, and production design, but it’s never quite as formally entrancing or as interesting as it fancies itself. Perhaps that’s just another way in which it reflects its charmed but charmless protagonists.