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Alain Delon, Romy Schneider and Jane Birkin are some of the reasons why this recovery from a French mystery deserves to be observed.
By Glenn Kenny
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“The Pool”, directed in 1969, is best known in the United States for its remake, “A Bigger Splash” 2016 frivolous and frivolous through Luca Guadagnino. The release of an immaculate recovery of the original, directed through Jacques Deray and starring Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet and Jane Birkin, deserve the reputation of this exciting film.
Schneider and Delon play Marianne and Jean-Paul, a French couple on holiday in a spacious villa in Saint-Tropez whose pool, the “Piscine” of the name, is one of their most outstanding attractions. pool as if they were a whole new couple. In fact, they’ve been in combination for two years. The informal nudity and allusions of S-et-M in his quotations recommend an erotic mystery in the early days of his release from the standards of censorship.
But as a thriller, it’s a very slow combustion. In the couple’s romance, Harry (Ronet), an old friend of Jean-Paul and Marianne’s former lover, rich pop music provider, arrives at the village growling Maserati with a marvel in tow: his teenage daughter Penelope, played Birkin’s whistles and whispers.
Nearly 10 years after his starring roles as Tom Ripley in “Purple Noon” and Rocco in “Rocco and His Brothers”, or in 1961, Delon still retained every apex of his ultrasensoryity. In dramatic roles, the actor, in spite of his sexy delicacy, has a tendency to solemnity, and this fits him well here. Jean-Paul, a loser who is now an advertising executive, is a sullen puzzle with a trace of threat.
Schneider and Birkin do well as independent women who, however, play as pawns through men, but Ronet almost leaves with the photo. Harry’s big smile is offset by a slightly visually raised eyebrow, and his passive-aggressive manipulation of Jean-Paul is terrifying.
Many other people who misbehave in charming environments are something we don’t see as much in videos as before. It is a master elegance in the subgenre and depth. (Deray worked on the script with the recently deceased prolific Jean-Claude Carriére. In the last third of the film, Jean-Paul shows shocking sadism. Once Jean-Paul and Marianne are exiled from their metaphorical Eden, they remain fully clothed for the rest of the image, and the film’s color scheme becomes more dreamy. Charming nuances like those make “La Piscine” a funny and disconcerting cinematic delight.
La Piscine in French, subtitled. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. At the Film Forum in New York. See the description through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching videos in theaters.
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