Movie Review: Swimming Pool

Note: This is a film review I wrote up after seeing the film some time ago. The review is not in a final form, but more rushed notes. I publish it for your interest and possible enjoyment...

Shades of Adaptation and Memento-like unexpected plot twists at the end. Sara Morton, a successful Engish novelist steals away to her publisher's French chateau for rest and inspiration. While there she encounters "Juli," her publisher's estranged, French daughter. Juli is the polar opposite of Sara, but is in actuality all that Sara would love to be. After beginning a novel in a mystery series, Sara begins to structure a book on Juli. As with Adaptation - another writer's movie - the film takes on the countours of the novel being written to the point that we the viewer cannot discern narrative from reality. This film, then, is another instance driving home the point of narrative and meaning; truth and reality.

The story is tedious and seems to lack direction at points - some further editing may have been nice. However, on the whole the story unfolds a wonderful, multi-dimensional mystery that keeps you asking the story-driving question, "What happens next?"

The writer explores another side of herself in Juli - who we find out is an extrapolated alter ego that she is able thorugh this experience to unleash in her literary world. The film, then, is one of inner sefl exploration, and encouragement to consider our "Juli." That's a helpful notion to a degree since we live within such solid identity frames in the western world. however, the film's suggestion shouldn't be taken outside of all moral bounds. There is an imaginable self that is really no self at all - only a whiff of smoke. That self is what we finally see in Juli - a free spirit who cannot properly handle the ramafications of her decisions. Interesting dialogue with Laurel Canyon at this point of alternate self-conceptions. Where is the modern "self" actually? Has it any actual, real discipline? Any true, normative, knowable definition? How is the self and identity navigated? Swimming Pool may simply be fluid, playful storytelling, but it ultimately alludes to these questions.

Interesting point of Juli reading her own story - characters becoming self-aware, no longer under control (absolute) of the author. That's truly musical writing. When the character has self-awareness in the mind that translates into full characterization in the story. The result certainly may be a kind of schizophrenia in the writer since she is ultimately the genesis of these characters. Is such division/fragmentation in the self psychosis? Appears on the surface to be. But once Sara finds Juli, she is never so whole/confident. Her embodiment of that opposing character empowers her in all ways!

There's alot of searching for the broader self here as well.