Just watched my first artsy, indie, foreign language movie since sometime in June. I had Tivoed Swimming Pool back in May, and after trolling around the 500+ channels available to us on the magical satellite t.v. and finding precisely nothing of interest, resorted to watching pre-recorded stuff. This is a French movie, starring Charlotte Rampling as a British mystery writer who is in a bit of a lull. She goes to her publisher’s house in the south of France for a restorative break, and encounters the publisher’s daughter, played by French actress Ludivine Sagnier who is hot, hot, hot in that surly, naked breasted, cigarette smoking, slightly unwashed French way. The narrative is quite engrossing until precisely 90 minutes into the movie, when it took a completely unbelievable turn and lost me. When you discover a dead body in the toolshed in the garden, you call the police, don’t you? I would.
One of the recurring motifs in the movie is of women writing their way to sanity, which I really like. And I like the curmudgeonly, cranky writer character. But I get weary of these movie ideas that sex is merely a tool, and a way for powerful women to manipulate poor befuddled men. There are a lot of beautiful visuals, and nice scenes of daily life in the Luberon, shopping in the village and spending time in a cafe. There are scenes which transform part-way through and reveal themselves to be flashes of imagination and not the "reality" of the scene. Part of the intrigue of the movie is that it’s difficult to tell how much of it is "real" narrative and how much of it happens only in the writer’s imagination.
Probably ready for an action/adventure movie now — or maybe we’ll watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is queued up in the Tivo.
Thoughts In Random Patterns 