La piscine: Savage Water

A swimming pool after nightfall can be a sinister place. In that, it’s like almost any venue designed for daytime pleasures—a shuttered amusement park, a deserted playground. But the specific menace of a private pool, one perhaps screened by trees that catch pockets of cooling evening air in their leaves, is faintly erotic. Bright water that holds the daytime memory of bare, slick skin turns to black mirror: a surface that reflects and inverts. And so, in Jacques Deray’s La piscine (1969), what is sex by day becomes death by night, when, from the same poolside spot where he frolicked earlier with his girlfriend, Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) kills Harry (Maurice Ronet) in a crime of passion notable for its dispassion.

This perversely listless murder was not the first time that Delon had sent Ronet to a watery grave. In René Clément’s Purple Noon (1960), based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, Delon became a star playing the insolent, insolvent Tom Ripley. With a razor grin slashing the sharp planes of his perfect face into a snarl, and the sun sparkling high in the sky, Tom knifes his wealthy friend Philippe (Ronet) in the stomach and pitches his body over the edge of a trim sailboat into an implacably blue Mediterranean. Then he eats a peach.

Almost a decade later, in the first of his nine collaborations with Deray, Delon forces Ronet under the teal waters of the pool on the darkened grounds of a Saint-Tropez villa. The villa in La piscine, like the sailboat in Purple Noon, is borrowed territory, a signifier of the eternally-at-leisure class to which both Delon characters feel entitled to belong. Both murders are opportunistic but also premeditated—note the deliberate way that Jean-Paul slips off his shoes by the pool’s edge; see the blade that Tom has stashed in the seat lining—and both are motivated by the same prideful envy, the same piqued ego and thwarted privilege. And in both films, Ronet plays a romantic rival: in La piscine, the two men bare their teeth and beat their chests over Delon’s real-life ex-lover Romy Schneider, as Jean-Paul’s girlfriend, Marianne, and Jane Birkin, as Harry’s coltish eighteen-year-old daughter, Pénélope. Each time, Delon’s permafrost eyes conceal his character’s intentions until the victim’s last gasp, and if, in La piscine, Jean-Paul does not messily devour a peach to signal an animalistic lack of remorse after the fact, he does the next best thing: he goes to sleep.

Not that Deray was ever actually in contention for that label. If La piscine lies outside the main run of his filmography, the filmmaker himself is forever considered apart from the Cambrian explosion of New Wave filmmaking and canonical reevaluation that was happening all around him. Cahiers du cinéma, ever in the business of sorting the auteur wheat from the mere metteur en scène chaff, firmly placed Deray in the latter category. “There has always been, with Jacques Deray,” chided its February 1969 review of La piscine, “a desire for geometry, a penchant for having everything accurate to the millimeter, too carefully situated.” The writer goes on to identify an “aridity” in the relationships between “characters who lack a backdrop." Certainly, La piscine’s plot is as skimpy as a bikini, and perhaps just as decadent, if you consider how completely it ignores the social protest movements that had peaked mere months before the cameras rolled. “Sous les pavés, la plage!” (Under the paving stones, the beach!) went the May ’68 rallying cry, as students and workers tore up the streets of Paris in an iconoclastic bid for the liberty represented by the sand beneath. But Deray’s film is already at the beach, and the era’s turbulent politics seem very far away. “This upheaval, of streets and of ideas, does not change anything for me,” Deray wrote in his memoir.

What contemporary relevance La piscine had was ephemeral, gossip-column fodder. It was a vehicle for vicarious intimacy with one of the era’s most golden celebrity pairings in Delon and Schneider—and the film’s astonishingly sexy opening, during which one could swear that an unfakable familiarity between his flesh and hers is detectable, is a brilliant example of giving the audience what it wants up front. But there was also the tabloid bluster of Birkin’s lover, Serge Gainsbourg, publicly warning the male stars away from his girlfriend. And most controversially, there was the so-called Markovic affair, surrounding the real-life murder of Delon’s former bodyguard, which raised suspicions about not only Delon but also then presidential candidate Georges Pompidou, the latter via explicit photographs found in the dead man’s possession, allegedly of Pompidou’s wife. The fact that offscreen sex, murder, and power struggles within a glamorous elite had their echoes on-screen all but guaranteed that a scandal-obsessed French public would flock to La piscine, while giving soberer commentators reason to balk at its tacky art/life imitation.

But to watch this villa thriller fifty years later, when its sensationalist context is largely forgotten, is to be able to find, in the spaces and silences that may have been filled with such ambient clamor at the time, both a cruelly ambivalent modernity and a take on masculine vanity, feminine disillusion, envy, and desire that is as archetypal as Greek myth. It’s the film’s very “empty rigor”—which Deray encouraged, requesting of Carrière that dialogue and description in the script be kept as minimal as possible—that gives La piscine a coolly enigmatic longevity that other, more robustly auteurist, or more politically engaged, visions of the era lack.

Read this way, Deray’s attention to detail (“I am a lover of quality . . . and a certain perfection in the directing work. I have a horror of amateurs,” he said in a 1971 interview) takes on a more heroic aspect. Under composer Michel Legrand’s sparingly used four-note motif, Jean-Jacques Tarbès’s camera work makes much of the sunshine and the simple, sometimes lascivious pleasures of looking at such pretty people. But the film’s signature shots are furtive, partially obscured, spying through glass panes, branches, or barred windows, as in the strange, salacious sex scene in which Jean-Paul undoes Marianne’s dress and leaves her waiting, topless, while he plucks a switch from a tree with which to tickle and slap her. The framing suggests that Harry’s arrival has already disturbed the free, indolent equilibrium of earlier, and that the couple are imprisoned in a newly unstable dynamic. “I love you,” says Marianne, ripping the shirt from Jean-Paul’s shoulders. “Don’t talk nonsense,” he replies.

Her dress, his shirt. The costuming—featuring pieces by André Courrèges, the designer credited with originating the miniskirt—plays an unusually central narrative role. Clothing is complicit, after all, in the lie of burnished surfaces that conceal true intent—it’s no accident that the characters become more covered up the deeper into intrigue they move. As Jean-Paul, Delon is in charismatic control when dressed only in shorts, with bright pearls of water clinging to his tanned shoulders, but he looks younger, somehow boyishly lost, when fully clothed. Outfits appear designed to remind us of nakedness: shirts are open to the navel—Harry’s, on that last night, is tight and slightly sheer even before the pool water slicks it to his torso. Pénélope, when not shown in scanty bathing outfits, reveals long expanses of leg below girlish ginghams and loosely crocheted minidresses.

But Schneider is the only cast member to actually appear naked. As it speeds around hilly chicanes, Harry’s sleek Maserati—chosen partly, one suspects, for the ironic watery symbolism of its trident hood ornament—is juxtaposed, in dubious taste, with a languorous pan up Marianne’s undressed body, stretched out facedown on a floofy white bedspread. When she is clothed, it’s often in discreetly revealing outfits—this is a film invested in the erotic potential of the smooth, bronzed back that she presents to Jean-Paul for scratching. Later, it’s on display again: she looks unexpectedly overdressed in a close-necked, diaphanous gown, until we see from behind how the garment is slashed down the spine from nape to tailbone, confirming her bralessness and heavily implying only the briefest of briefs, if any at all. Deray is never explicit in depicting unfaithfulness or transgression, but the sense of secrecy and illicit lust is all the more powerful for being oblique: Harry’s wandering hand slipping through the slit in Marianne’s dress; his incestuous caress of Pénélope’s prone, bikini-clad form; Pénélope, giggling, coming back from her sea swim with Jean-Paul, wrapped in his denim jacket, her hair straggly with salt water and the suggestion of sex.

But it’s not just the erotic that the wardrobe evokes. During Harry and Jean-Paul’s final confrontation, the men are, for the first time, dressed similarly, in white tops and blue jeans. They look like mirror images of each other, a psychologically provocative conceit that implies not only that Jean-Paul’s interest in Pénélope is partly an expression of Harry’s taboo desire for his own daughter but also that, when Jean-Paul, who we’re told has attempted suicide in the past, is dunking Harry under the reflective water, that act is also an attempt at self-erasure. There are versions of the Narcissus myth in which the young mortal, in love with his own beauty, drowns while trying to possess his reflection.

“I look at you—alive, eating, walking, answering the telephone—and it’s like I’m looking at you for the first time,” says Marianne in the stunned, sweltering days following the funeral. Jean-Paul has not changed—a sociopath cannot—but the murder, which may have been this monstrous egoist’s first honest act, has finally revealed him to her. He is paradoxically diminished by the revelation; his mystery is gone, and so, in the film’s final quarter, our attention is channeled toward Marianne. Marianne, we suddenly notice, has been magnificent all along. After being ogled and ignored and compared with Pénélope’s younger, blanker model, after being only briefly cherished and tossed like a medium-value chip onto the poker table of the men’s rivalry, Marianne—to whom Schneider lends such interiority, such secret smiles and sadnesses—is finally rewarded by inheriting the whole film.

Delon’s image was consolidated by La piscine; Schneider’s was liberated. Though she had been working steadily, she had not yet shaken off the wholesome Habsburg hokum of the Sissi movies that had made her famous in the midfifties. But the skin and the subtlety on display in her performance as Marianne not only announced her arrival as a performer of sensuality and maturity—immediately leading to a career-reinvigorating, award-winning five-film partnership with director Claude Sautet, starting with 1970’s The Things of Life—they are also central to La piscine’s most audacious narrative shift.

Everyone else in the film, even the apparently innocent but actually petulantly manipulative Pénélope, acts helplessly, according to the dictates of fate and the worst impulses of their bored, entitled natures. Only Marianne gets to choose. And the choice she makes (in the French version, not the simultaneously shot English-language pass, with its undermining, nonsensical final twist) is to become complicit, at the cost of her conscience. This could reduce her to a stereotype: yet another woman self-sacrificing for love of a worthless man. But as Schneider’s conflicted, uneasy Marianne fidgets and frowns in a climactic embrace that envelops but brings no comfort, just as the sun here is hot but spreads no warmth, a world of disastrous moral consequence is implied. It is an elegant deception, to grant Jean-Paul the murderous action but Marianne the momentous arc, and it gives La piscine its deep end: his is the drama, but hers is the tragedy.

La piscine: Savage Water

More: Essays

Eastern Condors: Collective Action

8½: The Beautiful Confusion

No Country for Old Men: All Hell Breaks Loose

Paper Moon: Partners in Crime

Search