charlotte rampling

Bonus Features: The Swimmer (1968)

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Our current Movie of the Month, 1968’s The Swimmer, stars Burt Lancaster as an aging suburban playboy who, on a whim, decides to “swim home” by visiting a string of friends’ backyard pools across his wealthy East Coast neighborhood.  It’s a boldly vapid premise that New Hollywood button-pusher Frank Perry (along with his then-wife Eleanor Perry, who wrote the majority of his early screenplays) somehow molded into a low-key mindmelter of 1960s moral rot through an eerie, matter-of-fact sense of surrealism.  The Swimmer is more of a quirky character piece than it is concerned with the internal logic of its supernatural plot.  Instead of only traveling by the “continuous” “river” of swimming pools he initially envisions over his morning cocktail, Lancaster spends much of the runtime galloping alongside horses, leisurely walking through forests, and crossing highway traffic barefoot.  He does often emerge from one borrowed swimming pool to the next, though, and along the way we dig deeper into the ugliness of his himbo playboy lifestyle.  He starts the film as a masterful charmer, seducing the world (or at least the world’s wives and mistresses) with an infectious swinging-60s bravado.  By the time he swims his last pool, we recognize him as a miserable piece of shit who doesn’t deserve to kiss the feet of the infinite wonderful women of his past whom we meet along the way.  The overall result is sinisterly ludicrous beefcake melodrama, presented in lurid Technicolor.

I can’t think of a better time to revisit The Swimmer than now.  Not only was its general film-nerd awareness boosted during its brief run on the Criterion Channel earlier this year, but it’s also been so brutally, unrelentingly hot outside that all I want to do is look at, dive into, and drown in swimming pools.  Every day that I have to take the bus or walk home from work in the Carribean hell heat of downtown New Orleans, I imagine how wonderful it would be if I could swim my way across the city in an endless line of swimming pools instead, just like in Perry’s film.  Unfortunately, even Lancaster’s decrepit playboy protagonist couldn’t pull that off without cutting some corners on-foot, so his swimming-home dream remains unachievable.  However, I have been able to swim my way across several other movies in the same milieu as The Swimmer: intense psychological dramas centered around summertime sex, booze and, of course, swimming pools.  So, here are a few more titles in that subgenre to check out in addition to our Movie of the Month.

La Piscine (The Swimming Pool, 1969)

There’s no telling how the over-the-hill playboy Ned sees himself in The Swimmer, but it might look a little like 1960s Alain Delon.  Delon was in his prime when he filmed his own poolside psych drama La Piscine, but his outer beauty does little to conceal the inner ugliness he shares with Lancaster in The Swimmer.  The film opens with Delon lounging half-naked poolside, barely lifting his head to sip his cocktail, then initiating sex with his girlfriend the second she’s within butt-swatting reach.  The couple are enjoying a horny, lazy vacation in South France before the reverie is interrupted the arrival of her ex-boyfriend and his teenage daughter, played by a young Jane Birkin.  Tensions quickly rise as it’s immediately apparent that everyone in the makeshift foursome is attracted to exactly the wrong person, threatening to escalate the volatile group dynamic with physical violence if anyone acts on their obvious, mutual desire.

La Piscine is not especially exciting as a psychological crime thriller, but it still excels as deliriously overheated summertime hedonism.  It feels like the entire cast is always seconds away from either a poolside orgy or an afternoon nap, and they’re all too miserable to enjoy either option.  It’s a real shame for all involved that the tension is released through violence instead of orgasm.  Before that act of violence (which takes place in the titular pool, of course), they lounge around a true summertime Eden, soaking up the oversaturated Eastman Color sunshine of a gorgeous, chic European locale.  There have been plenty of erotic dramas & thrillers over the years that have taken direct influence from La Piscine, but the director I found myself thinking of most was Luca Guadagnino, who borrowed its summertime color palette for Call Me By Your Name and its plot for A Bigger Splash (another classic in Swimming Pool Cinema).

Swimming Pool (2003)

Luca Guadagnino is not the only European hedonist to have floated a soft remake of La Piscine.  François Ozon’s 2003 erotic thriller Swimming Pool is so directly influenced by La Piscine that it barely bothered to change the title.  Charlotte Rampling stars as an uptight pulp mystery writer in need of inspiration, vacationing at another Southern French villa with its own backyard swimming pool.  Once there, she becomes obsessed with the sex life of a local twentysomething who has frequent, loud fuck sessions just one bedroom wall away.  The two mismatched women quickly develop a catty, petty roommate rivalry that, again, escalates to a shocking act of violence involving the swimming pool just outside their bedroom windows.  Swimming Pool works really well as a poolside erotic thriller (telegraphing some of the best aspects of Ozon’s Double Lover), but it works even better as a repressed-Brits-vs-the-liberated-French cultural differences comedy, as Rampling struggles to adjust to the local hedonism.

The differences between the two women’s personalities are plainly delineated by how they interact with the titular swimming pool.  While the younger roomie is content to swim in the pool without any leaf-skimming or PH maintenance, Rampling coldly declares “I absolutely loathe swimming pools” as a way to imply only a filthy beast would swim in that Petri dish.  It’s the difference between someone who truly lives and someone who only writes about people who live, a difference that Ozon sketches out with a sly smirk by the final reveal.  He also has a lot of fun playing with the wavy mirror surface of the pool water, reflecting and abstracting Rampling’s obsessive gaze as she ogles the half-naked youth swimming & fucking just outside her own bedroom. 

Deep End (1970)

If all of these suburban & provincial swim sites make the other swimming pool dramas on this list a little difficult to relate to as an urbanite in need of cooling off, dive into Jerzy Skolimowski’s Deep End instead.  Set in downtown Swinging 60s London, Deep End follows the mouthbreather exploits of a horny teenager who falls for his older coworker in an urban bathhouse, to both of their perils.  The story gradually establishes a hierarchy of low-level sex work from bathhouse-attendant tips to porno theater cruising sites to strip clubs and actual, true-blue brothels, but the bathhouse’s swimming pool is ultimately its main source of leisure and its main site of violence, as is customary to the genre.  As the teen’s older, street-wiser coworker, Jane Asher might be the most inspired “Risk it all for her” casting in the history of the practice; she could easily make a chump out of anyone.  Still, it’s incredibly bleak watching the ways the poorly socialized lout conspires to sexually corner her so that he can lose his virginity with his boyhood crush.  It probably says something that when he does finally corner her in the deep end of the central pool, it’s been entirely drained of water.  It’s eerily empty.

All four of these movies involve sex between adults and nearby youth.  All involve heavy drinking and physical violence, usually poolside.  No wonder this year’s January horror novelty Night Swim found so much to be scared of just beneath the surface of its backyard suburban swimming hole.  Pools are not just an excuse to get half-naked & cool off in a semi-social setting.  They’re also deadly, with just as much threat of drowning as threat of spontaneous sex & merriment.

-Brandon Ledet

Dune: Part Two (2024)

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Hey hey hey it’s throat-singing o’clock! I remember, lo several years ago now, when someone was online complaining about multiplex soundtrack overlap and how, in the moment that Beth died in Little Women, they could hear Babu Frik laughing in the next screening over. I had a similar experience last week when I could hear the chanting of the Sardaukar armies during a quiet moment in Drive-Away Dolls; I just sat there thinking how much I couldn’t wait to check out Dune 2, and that day has finally come. 

We open shortly after we left off in the last one, with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), the concubine of the late Duke Leto Atreides, have been taken in by Stilgar (Javier Bardem), the leader of a local division of scavengers known as Fremen. Paul has recently slain one of the Fremen in ritual combat, which makes most of them leery of him, but a young woman named Chani (Zendaya) sees something in the outworlder that she respects. The desert world of Arrakis, the only place in the universe where the space travel-enabling spice melange can be found, has been returned to the governance of House Harkonnen, headed by the Baron (Stellan Skarsgård), who is currently training his nephew Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler) in the ways of wanton cruelty and planetary management. The Bene Gesserit, as headed by Reverend Mother Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling) sets her sights on using Feyd as the fulfillment of her sect’s centuries-long eugenics/missionary work following the presumed end of the Atreides bloodline, but reports coming from Arrakis that there is a new leader among the Fremen raise the curiosity of Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), whose allegiance is torn between her allegiance to the Bene Gesserit and her loyalty to her father, the emperor (Christopher Walken). Meanwhile, on Arrakis, Paul becomes embedded with the Fremen. When his mother first attempts to use her powers and the apparent fulfillment of prophecy in Paul as proof that he is the long-awaited Fremen messiah, Paul’s public rejection of this endears him both to the non-believers, who appreciate his honesty, and the true believers, who believe that this is merely messianic humility. When his mother, now pregnant, drinks of the mysterious “water of life,” she becomes the new Reverend Mother of the Fremen, a position she’s more than happy to leverage to further spread the glad tidings of her son’s ascendancy. 

This is a huge movie, just big and bold and broad and beautiful. It’s so captivating that even a week later, I still feel more like it was something that I experienced more than it was something that I saw; talking about it as a film almost feels like the wrong way to discuss it. There’s a sequence in the movie in which the Fremen enact a guerilla attack on one of the Harkonnen spice-harvesting machines, which is dozens of stories high and takes up the same amount of space as a quarter of a city block. They come from multiple fronts—bursting forth from under the sand, storming out from behind caves, and sharpshooting one of those dragonfly helicopters. It’s so perfectly captured and rendered on screen that I could almost feel the desert sun on my skin, the heat coming off of the sand. The tremendous, hideous machine has these pillar-like feet/ground hammerers that move every few minutes, and Paul and Chani take cover behind one while working out how to take down the copterfly. There’s an almost ineffable, indescribable reality of the starkness of the shadow, the perfect sound mix, the pacing of the cuts, all of them in perfect harmony that is just pure movie magic, and I was there. Desert environments are inherently otherworldly, but they do exist in reality, such that in the rare instances that we do see other environs like the world where the Harkonnens’ seat of power is, these are even more removed from what we consider reality but appear so complete and real that it’s truly something to behold on the big screen. The sequence in which we visit the Harkonnen arena and the sunlight is so intense that everything is monochrome except in the shade is a particular standout, just phenomenal, and the inky, strange fireworks that fill the air only make it that much cooler. Everything that you’ve heard about this movie’s mastery of every facet of the art of filmcraft is true, and more. 

Narratively, this one does a great job of establishing all the lore that you would need to know through dialogue and imagery, and adds some things which give the text a slightly different depth or interpretation. While Stilgar is every bit the perfect disciple, who sees the wisdom of the prophesied “Lisan al-Gaib” even in Paul’s dismissal of the title (it shows the messiah’s humility) and is willing to give his own life just to give Paul a chance to speak to a quorum of tribal leaders, Chani is here (unlike in the text) unwilling to ascribe any kind of spiritual meaning to Paul’s accomplishments. The film chalks this up to a cultural difference, which helps make the Fremen seem less monolithic; the northerners (like Chani) are of a more agnostic bent than their neighbors in the south (like Stilgar), who are more religious in general and have among them a strong lean toward fundamentalism. Their opposing views of Paul make his tragic turn more meaningful, as he moves from the moral certitude that he must reject all attempts to elevate him to power, as he believes the Fremen can only be meaningfully and permanently liberated if they are led to victory by one of their own, to taking on the mantle of their deliverer and leading them against the Harkonnens. Although there was a kind of filigree that the David Lynch adaptation had that is mostly absent here, there are still moments of bizarre psychedelia as well; after all, it wouldn’t quite be Dune without it. Psychic dreams abound, and when Jessica drinks the Water of Life while pregnant with her daughter, the fetus becomes psychically capable of communication with her mother while possessing the knowledge and experience of a hundred generations, so there are some shots of her in utero as she and her mother “talk,” and that’s the kind of seriously-treated wackiness that makes this whole thing so much more than the sum of its parts. 

I wouldn’t normally make this specific recommendation, but I really think that you ought to see this one in theaters if you can. Every person that I talked to who saw the first Dune at the movies thought it was a staggering masterpiece, while reactions among those who saw it at home were more mixed. To paraphrase Nicole Kidman, we go to the movies to go somewhere we’ve never been before, not just to be entertained, but to be reborn. You should see this one as big as you can. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond