[Edition Prestige](France/Italy, 1969)
[a.k.a. La piscina /  Der Swimming Pool / The Swimming Pool / The Swimming Pool “First Love Never Dies”]
Review by: Kit Nygaard-Gavin
Written by: Jean-Emmanuel Conil [Alain Page]
Directed by: Jacques Deray
Cast: Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet, Jane Birkin, Paul Crauchet, Suzie Jaspard, Madly Bramy, Thierry Chabert, Steve Eckart
Source: M6 Video/ SNC (France, PAL Region 2, [French language version 117 min 10 sec / 114 min 04 sec [English language version])

A young couple in their thirties Jean Paul [Delon] and Marianne [Schneider] are spending a month at a villa on the Cote d’Azur.  Their days are spent relaxing, sunbathing in the sun and swimming in the titular piscine i.e. swimming pool.  However their peaceful retreat is interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Harry [Ronet], a successful record producer and one time love Marianne, and his flirty, not sexually inexperienced 18 year older daughter, Penelope [Birkin].  With Marianne’s apparent continued attraction to Harry, and Jean-Paul’s interest in Penelope, coupled with the questionable affection between the couple leads to a sexual tension in the villa and between the four players.  Tensions rise, sexual unease and power games ensue. All this leads to tragedy and ultimately the death of one of the players, who drowns in the swimming pool as a possible result of the tension and jealousy between the characters.  The police become involved, headed up by the suspicious inspector [Crauchet] and investigate events not believing that the drowning in the pool was the result of an accident but in fact murder.   

The film in itself plays out like a serious melodrama, laced with sexual intrigue and discomfort between the four leads.  What initially seems to be a loving couple (Delon, Schneider) turns out not to be and despite their squabbles and Marianne’s apparent strong affection for Jean-Paul turns out to be anything but a loving relationship, though there are subtle hints throughout that suggest this beforehand.  Also the relationship between father and daughter is decidedly awkward as well, with Harry using Penelope as a pawn to suggest that he is younger and more attractive than he actually is, together with the fact that he has nothing but disdain for Jean Paul and his writing, not least owing to his obvious displeasure that Marianne has chosen to settle and has seemingly fallen in love with his adversary.  The scorn which Harry has for Jean Paul is relayed him by Penelope, and effectively by her telling him sparks a rage in Jean Paul and effectively signs the death warrant of the father she has little more than contempt for.

Additionally, and perhaps surprisingly, the film does not succumb to the trend at the time for sex scenes and/or nudity by it’s attractive female leads, which was popular in European cinema at the time and generally seen as totally respectable by the actresses involved in the films being made.  Schneider does appear topless briefly in a couple of short scenes, but both times it is a not played upon and to show the less than pleasant side to Delon and the means to which he behaves badly.  There is a further brief scene, artistically shot and revealing very little, of the naked Schneider lying on the bed sleeping.  By contrast, the young, pretty Jane Birkin, surprisingly, has no scenes of nudity, which is unusual considering she would appear frequent nude appearances in films as well as in French girlie magazines at the start of the 70’s [usually photographed by her companion, Serge Gainsbourg, who made her waiflike looks cute and sexy.  Birkin appears in a number of skimpy bikinis mostly sunbathing or in a vain attempt to flirt with Jean Paul, who clearly has his eyes on her, but seemingly only to get back at Harry, her father, who is successful and the previous paramour of Marianne.

Direction is extremely proficient and professional.  Scenes are efficiently and well directed, and the re-shooting in English shows the competence of the four leads to re-shoot the same scene twice, employing the same movements, the same gesticulations as the scene shot before in French, at times marginally different owing [perhaps] to the difference of the language employed in the dialogue.  The majority of the action takes place around the swimming pool, rather than in it, which might at times lend a somewhat stagy and theatrical feel to proceeding.  However this does not detract from the performances nor the intelligence or competence and subtlety of the direction taking place.  Coupled with the respect Deray clearly has for the talent of his four leads performances.

The director Jacques Deray, who died in 2003, was already an accomplished professional by the time he made this film at the age of thirty-eight, he already had 6 films under his belt and had worked as an assistant director and technician for directors as prolific as Luis Buñuel.   In addition to the respect he had gained in the field of cinema, he was already recognized as a writer of thrillers in France.  Working with the treatment by Alain Page [written under the pseudonym of Jean-Emmanuel Conil], Deray spent 6 months working on the screenplay with Jean-Claude Carrière (interviewed on the second disc), who had at the time an impressive resumé of work prior to his collaboration here with Deray.

The film commenced shooting September 1968 at Ramatuelle, in the south of France.  Upon release in January 1969, the film was to prove to be one of the most popular cinema releases that year, with over 2 million paying spectators alone in France.  At the time, the lead actor, Alain Delon was enjoying the height of his popularity in his homeland of France, not least in his status as an actor but amongst the public as a personality and was at the time considered by most of the French male population to be worthy of respect owing to his affiliations with various beautiful women as well as his performances as in actor in various fine productions.  It was at Delon’s suggestion that Schneider was cast opposite him in the film, despite the reservations who still thought of Schneider as being <> the role of Elisabeth of Austria which she had played in 1955 and had been eager to shrug of (to varying degrees of success) since then.  However it was her role as Sissi for which Schneider (she was to complain that role would stick to her <>) that Schneider was and is most remembered despite delivering solid and quality performances throughout her acting career.  So impressed was Deray by Schneider’s performance in the film he would re-cast her in his next feature whilst La piscine was in post production.  As the opening credits roll on the screen, in both the English and the French version, the Christian names of the two leads Alain and Romy appear for a few isolated seconds before their surnames appear below, which would have reminded most cinema goers of the fact that the two were once upon a time a couple.  A nice little touch which adds gain something, albeit very subtly, to the proceedings that will take place in the following couple of hours on screen.

An interesting piece of movie trivia is that whilst the film was in production, the real police turned up on the set of the film to interview Delon in the course of the investigation of a real life murder.  During the movie’s shooting, the former secretary and cousin of one of his best friends, Stefan Markovic, was found dead with a bullet in the head.  However this incident didn’t damage Delon’s career, despite the police questioning his somewhat suspicious behavior, the suspicious circumstances in which the body was found, and his known disagreements with the victim’s cousin, Miklos Markovic.  The incident affect didn’t affect the working relationship between Deray and Delon either, as the two of them continued to work together on numerous other projects in the years following completion of La piscine.

In addition to the casting of Delon, an established star in France, cast opposite was the beautiful Austrian actress Romy Schneider, also a household name as much as a popular movie actress and star throughout Europe, and the frequent protagonist of numerous and various productions since her start as a child star in Austria in the mid 1950s.  Schneider had been romantically involved with Delon [the two were fiancés before a brutal split] in the early 60s, as well appearing in various productions both on screen and stage (having initially worked together following her casting as Annabella in the John Ford tragedy <>, on the Paris stage, which was directed by Luchino Visconti, who had directed Delon in Rocco and his Brothers and soon after in The Leopard).  Initially the producers had wanted to cast Monica Vitti or Angie Dickinson in the role of Maianne, however Delon refused to take the role unless Schneider was cast.  Following this role, despite still being unable to shrug off the “Sissi” personage who would be a constant sword of Damocles throughout her career, Schneider was offered more substantial and interesting roles, and would continue to be an established star until her death.  

Most people believe Schneider’s death to have been suicide owing to her young age though the official verdict was given as coronary problems.  Schneider’s personal life and fortune had started to slide downhill following two unhappy marriages.  In addition there was the tragic and unexpected death of her young son, David, following a tragic accident in which he was impaled on the railings of the fence outside his grandparents’ home in Paris.  In addition there was a dependency on alcohol, coupled with apparent drug problems to escape from her fading star quality and popularity.  Shnider had posed in tasteful nude photos for Paris Match to show she was still attractive in 1976 but these were mostly unpublished at the time.  She was found dead in the apartment she was staying in, in the rue Barbet-de-Jouy, Paris aged just 43, on the morning of the 29th of May 1982, by her friend, the producer Laurent Petin. 

Perhaps as an affectionate nod to the <> coupling by the director, when the titles open the film the Christian names of the couple appear briefly without their surnames before the rest of the titles play out.  The role of Harry, Jean-Paul’s rival for the affections of Marianne, was played by Maurice Ronet, a fine French actor at the time, and who had starred previously opposite Delon in the film Plein Soleil [a.k.a. Purple Noon]; a fine and highly respected adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s celebrated thriller <>, with Delon as the conman Ripley, and Ronet as the wealthy young lothario [Philippe] Greenleafe.  Ronet was to die of cancer the year following Schneider’s death in Paris in 1983, his career continuing at a fairly regular pace up until then.  

The role of Harry’s daughter is played by the young [21 year old], gawky, pretty yet toothy and relatively inexperienced English actress and égérie of Serge Gainsbourg, Jane Birkin.  Birkin and Gainsbourg had sung the notorious <> together. In addition, Birkin was already quite well known to the arthouse crowd for her appearances in  Wonderwall [reviewed previously for Cinema Nocturna] and for a brief but memorable role in Blow Up, having appeared fleetingly in a full fronal nude scene for a sexual threesome also involving David Hemmings and Gillian Hills.  Birkin’s career in the 70’s would cover all sorts of roles from sexy movies to amusing comedies where she played the English girl with a funny accent to the infamous Je t’aime moi non plus, directed by Serge Gainsbourg, where she played the androgynous waitress, Johnny, sodomized by Joe Dallesandro, to appearances in all star cast adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, and Evil Under the Sun  It was only after her split from Gainsbourg at the end of the 1970s, and her appearance in <> directed by her future [and third] husband Jacques Doillon, father of her third daughter, the actress Lou Doillon.

Extras are spread out over both discs.  The most significant extra, if it is to be counted as an extra, is the inclusion of the alternative English language edit of the film which is on the second disc.  According the sleeve notes, the English language version had the same scenes and locations and, of course, the same actors shot contemporaneously with the French version but entirely replayed [and subsequently redubbed] in English.  The English version does have differences from the French version, some of the language is more subtle and milder, scenes such as when Schneider speaks English in the French version, she speaks German in the English edit.  But perhaps, the most significant difference between the two releases is the ending of the film, which adds on nearly an extra half-minute to the final scene, but which makes for a more dramatic finale than in the original edit.  The extra footage is included as one of the supplements on the first DVD / French language edition, which will not make any sense or seem insignificant when viewed independently of the feature itself.  In addition, the English print is presented with English opening titles, identical to the French but with an additional subtitle beneath the films export title of <>.  

An unusual technique employed during the shooting of the film was that the sequence in which the scenes were filmed was actually following the order of events as they take place in the film in the order which they appear on screen, first in French then straight afterwards re-taken in English.  This unusual approach by the director in fact adds to and allows for the characters and their moods to change and reflect the mounting intrigue surrounding them together with the tension between all four players in the power games being played which ultimately end in death and tragedy.  

On disc one, the extras consist of the original Theatrical trailer, presented in full screen, again clean and in excellent condition, both visually and aurally.  The trailer itself, thankfully, gives little of the story of the way, but presents a drama, a spectacle which would have been of great interest to the French public at the end of the 1960’s not least because it featured in the starring roles Alain Delon and Romy Schneider who has been one of cinema’s golden couples at the beginning of the 1960s but had separated soon after, with Delon having married (and subsequently divorced his first wife Nathalie) and was involved with Mireille D’Arc at the time; and Schneider had been married to her first husband Harry Meyer (who commited suicide in 1979) for two years.  Despite both stars being involved in other relationships when the movie was made, there is an obvious frisson between the two of them and the chemistry is clear.  The trailer is quite wordy with the screen splitting occasionally as was fashionable at the time to show something else in the background.  In addition there are 9 pages [in French] of “liner notes” telling some of the history of the shooting of the film by Jean Ollé-Laprune.

On the second disc there is a short excerpt lasting 2 minutes taken from a French TV newsreel reportage in 1969, in black and white, consisting mainly of an interview with an on-camera with Alain Delon talking about the film, followed by the emotional arrival of Romy Schneider at Nice airport and her <> with Alain Delon and her discussing briefly the film that the two of them were to make together before the footage is cut short.  

Language options are limited to French on the first disc (without any subtitles as an option, never mind English language) and English on the second disc (with removable French subtitles).  The lack of English subtitles on the French version may be a disappointment for viewers who do not understand/speak French, but for those who understand English, the English version is the one to watch.  Although slightly shorter, it makes very little difference, the film is essentially identical in theme and ideas, and the performances by all four leads is equivalent to it’s French counterpart.  In addition all four leads dub their performances in both the English version as well as the French version, making Birkin’s slightly awkward command of the French language (spoken in her distinctive English accent – appropriate however as she plays a seemingly naïve English girl) all the more endearing/irritating, depending on the sensibility of the viewer.  Delon and Ronet both speak fluently and clearly in the English version, as does Schneider, who by the late 1960s could clearly speak and perform in both French and English fluently.  Only the role of the police inspector, performed by Paul Crauchet, was dubbed into English, owing to the actor’s inability to speak both languages.  Sound quality itself is clear and crisp without any background noise or hiss, and the music is clean during the opening credits and when used throughout the film.  

The prints used (both the French and the English variant) are equally excellent.  The tanned skin tones of the protagonists all look natural, colors are bright yet accurate, the film has been beautifully remastered and is clean and crisp and looks like it had been made yesterday.   Previous releases have been limited to a French disc where colors were somewhat flat and muted, with a small selection of extras and carrying a heavy price label (released through TF1) and a German cheap-ish release as Der Swimming Pool, without any extras, in German and French language tracks and presented in a fullscreen unexceptional transfer with uneven and bad color quality (Delon looked like a sun burnt shrimp as the film opened with him lying by the pool).  The print used for this release (together with the English language version is of the highest quality, and has been released in high-definition.  The blue of the swimming pool is as clear and fresh as the blue of Schneider’s eyes, and the print has been presented in its correct aspect ratio of 1.66.

Of the two versions presented it is difficult to specify a preference because both are essentially the same film, and the English version, for a change is not hampered by awkward dubbing or by dubbing which does not follow the lip movements of the actors on screen [moreso given that the majority of the actors have dubbed their lines in English themselves].  My preference I suppose is for the French version, because the English language version is somehow milder in content with some of the swearing, some of the anger, friction has been slightly toned down, from the outset where Delon callously throws the topless Schneider into the pool after a moment of passion and the phone rings midway through and Schneider curses him for his behavior.  Interestingly in her dialogue with Harry on the phone, in the French version Schneider speaks to Harry in English on the phone, and in the English version, she converses with him in German.  Also the English version runs 3 minutes shorter, but I couln’t see any discernable differences between the two versions despite the running time difference.  Indeed the English version has an extended ending which suggests that the French version is roughly three and a half minutes longer in terms of content of the main body of the film, but again, this wasn’t discernable.

In conclusion, La Piscine admittedly has long been one of my favorite films, so I was extremely excited when I saw that it had been released in an Edition Prestige in France, which caught my eye I was in FNAC in Chatelet les Halles, and it was a <> tout-de-suite.  The film has slightly (but by no means considerably) dated [not unsurprising really] since it’s initial release at the end of the sixties.  The mood is still there, performances are still sincere and all the pent up sexual tension played out between the four leads is still there.  Some of the mood, and the lounge music which plays over the opening credits (together with a very 1960s party and fashions) betray the date of the film.  In addition, the fact that two of the leads (Ronet and Schneider) are both deceased.  Delon and Birkin, now 40 years older, are both still active, which dates the film further, but this seems irrelevant and does not mar the enjoyment of the film.  Altogether a very satisfying release of an excellent film, preciously only available on substandard or unexceptional DVD releases, this Collectors’ edition is the one to get.  Highly recommended!!

STORY/FILM : - 4.5 / 5 Bitch Slaps
PICTURE: - 5 / 5 Bitch Slaps
AUDIO: - 4.5/ 5 Bitch Slaps
EXTRAS: - 4 / 5 Bitch Slaps
OVERALL DVD: - 4.5 / 5 Bitch Slaps
 

***Further reading [and references]:
Bonini, Emmanuel:  La véritable Romy Schneider. Editions : Pygmalion - Gérard Watelet / J’ai Lu  2001 [French language]
Simmons, Sylvie : A Fistful of Gitanes.  Helter Skelter Publishing 2002
[English language]
Violet, Bernard: Les mystères Delon. Editions: Flammarion 2000
[French language]