The Swimming Pool (1969)
Directed by Jacques Deray
Set in a magnificent villa near a sun-drenched St. Tropez, lovers Jean-Paul and Marianne are spending a happy, lazy summer holiday. Their only concern is to gratify their mutual passion - until the day when Marianne invites her former lover and his beautiful teenage daughter to spend a few days with them. From the first moment, a certain uneasiness and tension begin to develop between the four, which soon escalates in a dangerous love-game.
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What critics compared The Swimming Pool to
Whether loosely rethinking Jacques Deray’s film La Piscine (1969) into A Bigger Splash (2015), translating an André Aciman book into the 2015 film Call Me By Your Name, or remaking Dario Argento in 2017 with a superior version of Suspiria, it’s Guadagnino’s attention to character, theme, and atmosphere that elevates his take on established stories.
Adapted from Camille DeAngelis’ 2016 YA novel and working off a script from favored Guadagnino screenwriter David Kajganich (the aforementioned Suspiria as well as the inscrutable La Piscine remake, A Bigger Splash), Bones and All operates in an unusual tonal space, bringing a sense of near fairytale whimsy to a project that features a teen girl getting her fingers chomped off in its first 10 minutes.
There’s more to the story: a startling rumor, a couple of parties, a nosy neighbor (a typically sharp Tracy Letts), a few unfortunate “accidents” and a swimming pool that glows as ominously as the one in “La Piscine,” Jacques Deray’s 1969 classic of sex, deceit and murder.
While mostly convincing as a fable of idle island horniness gone murderously wrong (evoking everything from its source material, La Piscine, to The Talented Mr. Ripley ), A Bigger Splash , especially in its late-stage transformation into a finger-wagging political parable against the evils of privilege, felt like the work of a filmmaker trying to do too much.