There’s nothing unusual about viewing tastes changing over the decades. It’s a shame though that people don’t have the ability to view a film these days through the critical filter of the time. If you don’t like something, you don’t like it. I don’t like Dali’s work, but that’s OK. I don’t call Salvador Dali’s paintings ‘crap’ because I don’t like them. The Swimming Pool is slow by today’s standards, but not the standards of the day. We live in a world now, where people find a three second wait after clicking a button to be an eternity.
It isn’t the most perfectly executed storyline, true. I have a feeling though that the Coen brothers would love this movie and that all 1-star reviewers of this film would hate the Coen Brothers’ work as well. It is an uncommon piece that was not made for a 2012 audience, yet the Coen Brothers’ work is made for our era and still polarises viewers. Anton Chekhov was the first to write subtext into plays. It was no longer about what the characters were saying, it was about what they weren’t saying. What was UNDER the surface. The Swimming Pool is a great example of subtext still being alive and well a century after Chekhov and Stanislavsky pioneered it.
Alain Delon entirely lives up to his reputation as France’s James Dean. He broods, he smolders, he doesn’t have to say much to be engaging. The cast was well put together and to the reviewer below who noted the ‘creepy relationship’ between father and daughter, congratulations. You’ve recognised one of the ground-breaking moments that cinema occasionally offers up. Something that Disney and Julia Roberts films will never offer you.
Just as Dali isn’t my cup of tea, being challenged isn’t the taste of many viewers these days. But that, like variation in film styles, is totally OK.
by Paul Barry
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