We watched this movie and it held our interest all the way through, although
I will say that it is very artsy and european and had a lot of charachter stuff
with not that much plot. For a long time you have no idea where it's even going
because there's not too much happening.

It picks up quite a bit as soon as the sexy young blonde girl enters the picture,
and she is soon very topless and showing her gorgeous young supple boosom
all over the place -- which is the very best part of the picture. There are some
provocative sex scenes too, but overall, the tone is strange.

It was a sexy movie, and it did provide a good warmup for some hot activities
later on the living room floor, where we got to put the techniques from the
NEW SEX NOW dvd to good use.

An English unmarried woman who writes detective stories is suspiscious from the very start. There is an Agatha Christiean unprofessional detective dilettante in every single English woman who has reached a rather mature and ripe age. Here the lady is trapped between her old semi-dependent father and her domineering and definitely taste-lacking publisher, and she finds an escape in her publisher's French summer home where she meets a young girl who is going to provide her with the opportunity to be what she has been chasing all her life through her detective stories, a criminal, or at least a master mind for the cover-up of a crime. She cannot find any pleasure in some kind of sexual or emotional adventure, but she can find a lot of pleasure in being what she has imagined herself to be all her life : a criminal evading the police. All it takes is a few square yards of peaceful water in a garden, what we call a swimming pool in plain language. This swimming pool is going to attract victims like honey attracts flies and bees, or even foxes and bears. And she is not going to do all that for the only pleasure of doing it, but for the far more satisfying pleasure of turning the experience into a novel that will be discarded by her publisher who is a literary redneck and the infinitely more pleasurable experience of having this discarded novel published by a competitor. Publishers hate competitors by definition, profession and conviction. That's how real life for one who has some imagination can become the subject and the raw material that person is going to turn into a virtual reality that will feel even more real than the real reality we can find in the world and taste or see if we have sensitive eyes or a delicate tongue. Brilliantly decadent in a way.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

Beautifully filmed thriller with an excellent cast. Plot keeps you on the edge of your seat until the very end, even with the many attempts by the film makers to distract us with Ludivine Sagnier stunning beauty.

I really did not enjoy this film after I first screened it. However, I have reconsidered watching it again, after reviewing some five pages of plausible possibilities on what exactly transpired during the 103 minutes of this film.

On the surface, the movie seems pretty straight forward. A lonely, bitter, spinster, English murder mystery novelist travels to France, at her publisher's request, for some much needed rest and relaxation. Her publisher hopes this getaway will re-invigorate his client to write again. While staying at her publisher's villa in France, the author (Sarah) is joined by Julie, the publisher's daughter, who has also stopped by her father's house for some rest and relaxation. A murder is committed, and our two female characters go on to depose of the evidence. In the end, Sarah writes a new murder mystery novel titled "Swimming Pool" which retells the events of her French retreat, only to have it distributed by another publishing firm.

The issue at hand is what's real and what's fiction. The most common belief is that at some point in the film, the movie moves from reality to a novel-in-progress being created in our author's mind; however, being played out right before the audience's eyes. Again, it's up to you (the audience) to figure out where reality stops and imagination begins. Others believe that everything is real. That our publisher is some sort of male gigolo, who has left many scorned women in his path to include our writer, and her novel is her retribution for his actions. There are even others who believe that it's the color red which is splashed throughout this film, that holds the true key to unlocking the mysteries of this film. The speculations go on and on from the absurd, "that this is a tawdry tale of incest and debauchery"; to the more interesting, "that Julie and Sarah are one and the same person." Either way, it's up to the viewer to develop their own conjectures and conclusions. Which I am sure will be different from anyone else, but isn't that why you go to the movies in the first place? To provoke thought, and evoke discussion.

Again, the film is not as cut-and-dry as it may first appears, and I highly recommend visiting the message board for the "Swimming Pool" on IMDb(http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0324133/board/threads/). Just to see how other interpreted the film as well. I have to admit that I am willing to give this film another shot. Maybe you should do the same. I must add that some of the subject matter in this film is VERY adult and sexual in nature. This film could very easy upset those of you who are easily offended. View at you own risk.

http://farisreel.com

I call this a mystery, and that's what it still is to me, even after I have watched it. There are a lot of strange things in this film, dead ends and odd details that go unexplained. What makes the film work (and achieve the three star status) is the tension between the young beauty, whose clothing-optional policy makes the movie worth owning, and the "old maid" crime writer, who is both jealous of and attracted to her (I hasten to add, only crypto-lesbian--nothing overt--but the whole swimming pool scene smacks of "A Death in Venice").

(...)

The negs are the long silences as the camera dwells upon the old maid's sulks and anxieties. In the long run, this crime writer is a bit too dim and depressing a subject to sustain audience interest, though she begins to open up as the movie progresses. We dislike her, not for looks but just personality or lack thereof. She acts like every day is a funeral. The other part I dislike is the ambiguity at the end, but I will not go into that, prefering not to divulge a Secret. I also found the treatment of the male sex in general to be rather horrible and insect-like. This movie is the kind of thing that unsettles and chills rather than makes you feel warm. At the end, I came to the conclusion that both the old maid and the young tart were out and out crazy. The ending might have been made plainer--I felt short-changed. The writer built us up for a grand climax, and left us scratching our head.