French director Francois Ozon's Swimming Pool is one of those films about unleashed desires and creativity that -- what a coincidence -- just happens to call for more nudity than a made-for-Cinemax erotic thriller.
Charlotte Rampling employs her hard-used glamour to cutting effect as Sarah Morton, a prickly mystery writer who borrows her publisher's French country house for a working vacation. Sarah's so starchy and standoffish that we eagerly anticipate an intrusion on her peace and quiet, which comes in the person of her publisher's French daughter Julie (Ludivine Sagnier). Julie, a trampy hedonist, disrupts the vacation house with men, wine and marijuana.
Julie both distracts and fascinates Sarah, who voyeuristically observes her younger housemate's daytime sun baths and nocturnal hook-ups. The camera repeatedly tracks up and down Sagnier's lithe form as she wears tight shorts, skimpy bikinis and even less than that. You suspect that Ozon himself is besotted with Sagnier's body: He lingers so long on her breasts that it's like he's trying to guess their weight. (You imagine someone in the crew nudging the director: "Dude! Her face is up there!")
Ozon recently worked with both actresses -- Rampling in her 2001 comeback Under the Sand, Sagnier in 8 Women -- and both give the director a great deal of trust to deliver performances that are more than physically revealing. The film relies on the cliche of pleasure-seeking French and repressed English, but it intrigues when the two wage mind games on each other. Their conflict comes to a head when Julie spitefully tries to seduce the quietly macho waiter who's caught Sarah's eye.
The swimming pool becomes a flexible symbol for the psyche, mirroring each woman's attitude about desire. Sarah recoils at the dirty leaves under the pool cover, while Julie removes the cover to skinny-dip. When Ozon cuts from Sarah writing at her laptop to the pool itself, it evokes how the creative process dives into the subconscious.
Unfortunately Swimming Pool builds to routine ideas about releasing inhibitions, and Ozon's cool control loses confidence with the film's melodramatic turns. The film ends with a twist that's more thought-provoking than we anticipate, but up until then Swimming Pool spends too much time splashing around in the shallows. 
