Jason C
Reviewer

      Deliciously sexy and captivating, “Swimming Pool” is an erotic cat and mouse game where the cat is Sarah Morton, a sexually repressed mystery writer in her 50s (Charlotte Rampling), and the mouse is sexually overactive French girl Julie (Ludivine Sangier). This first English language film by director Francois Ozon capitalizes on his well-known feminist themes to entrance viewers into this story of a writer using the world around her for continual artistic inspiration.
 
      The film starts out quite dramatic before slithering into a sensuous mystery that's anything but traditional. Sarah uses her novels to bring sex, murder and crime into her boring English life. So burnt out, she refuses to acknowledge a fan on the metro and simply says "you must be mistaking me for someone else" before hurrying away.
 
      She kindly accepts her publisher's French villa for a change of scenery, although she hopes he will visit her and throw some romance into her life. Instead, sexually charged Julie, her publisher's daughter, enters her life. Julie looks 16 but is actually 24-years-old, which is probably good to hear for all of the men out there entranced by her lack of clothing throughout the film.
 
      The two women co-exist, bitter about each other’s intrusion and doing their best to make the other suffer. Julie brings a different French man home each night and has wild, passionate sex that forces Sarah to use earplugs each evening. After Julie fills the fridge with a variety of delicious-looking French cuisine, Sarah breaks her yogurt-only diet to sample a little bit of each item. This is highlighted when Sarah drinks some of the wine and then fills the bottle up with water to compensate. The two very different women start off at odds but quickly become immersed into each other’s lives.
 
     Ozon takes his time with “Swimming Pool”, allowing both actresses to have a time to shine and prove that a facial expression can be worth a thousand words. Despite the 30-year age difference, both women are on the same playing field and prove to be brilliant actresses, whether vindictively against each other or aiding and abetting each other in a particularly grisly moment of the film. Without saying a word, filmgoers will sense Sarah's disapproval in her publisher that not only does he have a secret life in France, but that he failed to warn her about the daughter ruining a perfectly quiet weekend.
 
      Without giving away the spectacular surprise ending, the film really heats up when Julie drunkenly brings home a local waiter who is more attracted to Sarah than Julie. For the duration of the film, the women use their sexual prowess to get what they want and Sarah gives Demi Moore a run for her money in the "I'm over 40 and still damn attractive" race by wearing much less than Moore's bikini in “Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.”
 
      The swimming pool of the film's title provides Ozon with the water imagery that he brings to all of his films. The pool becomes a character in itself and lives as a metaphor for reflection as Julie spends most of her days within it and Sarah paces around it and stares at it for inspiration. This is a film about secrets, which is appropriate considering that, unlike most mysteries, Ozon allows filmgoers to figure out the ending on their own, keeping the ending's meaning a very intriguing secret in itself.