Francois Ozon

     In the off-year 2003 at the Cannes Film Festival, Francois Ozon's Swimming Pool, frothy but entertaining, was one of the few movies in Competition to escape the wrath of the international film critic corps. Nobody considered Swimming Pool worthy of a Palme D'Or; but many in the press thought that Charlotte Rampling, playing a brittle, nervous British crime writer, Sarah Morton, should have won Cannes' Best Actress prize. Or perhaps that prize might have been shared with Rampling's lively French co-star, Ludivine Sagnier. She portrays a Eurotrash twentysomething, Julie, whose crude television watching, topless swimming, and public fornication threatens to ruin Ms. Morton's sedate time on a Provencal country estate, where the writer is struggling to craft a new murder novel.

     "I read Agatha Christie when a child, yes, I do like her novels," Francois Ozon, the French filmmaker (Sitcom, 8 Women), said at Cannes. "But with this movie I thought more about Ruth Rendell and Patricia Highsmith. I'm particularily interested in the discrepancy of outward appearance, what these women looked like, and what they wrote about. Highsmith is always concerned with exchange of identities. That's important to me, and I've used it in several films."

     In interviews, Ozon has explained how he studied the pathologies of British women crime writers, and noted how "a number of them drink too much, have repressed lesbian tendencies, and are fascinated by perversions." In this way, the character of Sarah Morton was built in the screenplay: a rigid, puritanical veneer, but with a voyeuristic interest in the naked female body, and murder.

     "I looked at pictures of Rendell and Highsmith," said Charlotte Rampling, who accompanied Ozon to Cannes. "Highsmith had a ravaged face. Those writers tend to have very short hair."

     How did Ozon choose Rampling for Sarah Morton?

     "I was looking for a woman who was 50 years old and who was beautiful, who was not 'overhauled' and who was willing to wear a swimsuit." And yet who is protective of her dignity. "The very first time I saw Charlotte Rampling, I said, 'I would like to film you using a vacuum cleaner.' She was very British, and answered, 'I think not.'"

     Rampling starred earlier, and successfully, in Ozon's Under the Sand. He insisted she play the lead in Swimming Pool before he'd written a word of the script. "I asked Charlotte to play this bad-tempered woman. She said, 'Yes.'" Ozon consulted with her the four months he wrote the screenplay, his first in English. Then he cast Ludivine Segnier, who had appeared in two of his films, Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women.

     "We filmed in chronological order," Rampling said.

     "We started with Sarah coming from England. She's down in her depth, but she goes to the South of France with the sun and the geography. Then this girl comes along. When Ludivine arrived on the set a week later, the interruption was felt by both me, the actor, and the character." Unlike in the movie, where Sarah and Julie are strained, uncomfortable roommates, Rampling said, "Ludivine and I had instant rapport. She reminds me of me at her age: honest, intelligent, and wanting to be part of the real world."

     Ozon: "The idea was to shoot something different from 8 Women, which was a very heavy production. I felt a need for something more intimate, almost a holiday. I decided to work with only two women, and with whom I get along very well. Who are my friends. I'm always more interested in women characters than male. They are more complex, and I get along better with actresses than actors. Maybe that explains my films: I have to feel desire for the actors, not necessarily to sleep with them."

     Cannes critics were divided: is everything in the movie "real," or are there, in part, fantasy projections?

     Ozon: "This film is about the creative process. It could be just as well about an arist or a filmmaker as a novelist." Or the spectator. Ozon: "I want everyone in the audience to write their own versions of Sarah Morton's book. If there are as many interpretations as members of the audience, I want that."

GERALD PEARY
(Boston Phoenix, July 2003)

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