a tribute: "the swimming pool"

"Is it hot out?" inquires a bronzed Romy Schneider. Without missing a breathless beat, an equally tawny Alain Delon replies, "Boiling!" Bluntly titled "The Swimming Pool", Jacques Deray's 1969 scorcher concocts a morality tale about devotion, relationships, and the desires that percolate beneath the surface. The action is hermetically set around an ominous swimming pool at the Riviera estate of a sun-kissed couple, Marianne (Schneider) and Jean-Paul (Delon). The action in question is the unexpected arrival of an old friend (Maurice Ronet) and his gamine daughter (Jane Birkin). What results doesn't really matter so much. How can you concern yourself with a plot when Birkin is traipsing about a party in high-waisted jeans, plain white tee, and no regard for a bra? Schneider is a sensuous vision in a mod André Courrèges confection for a dinner party scene that is fueled by so much sexual tension and repression you'd expect smoke rings to find their way out of someone's ears. The real star of the show, Mr. Delon, is the epitome of casual summertime male glamour. Sunglasses, basic tees, jeans, an endless array of swim trunks--what more does a man need for a weekend spent by the pool? To see Delon looking so relaxed in a denim jacket or short sleeve linen shirt is a bit jarring for those of us who are more familiar with the elegant coolness (René Clément's "Purple Noon" and Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'Eclisse") or the hard as nails killers (Jean-Pierre Melville's "Le Samourai") and cops (Deray's "Flic Story") he has iconically played. The film is permeated by a loose, beachy breeziness that befits the ease of its otherwise ultra glamorous stars, and yet intrinsically connects the literal heat to the primal sensuality each of the leads are more than capable at exuding. Clad in only their bathing suits while intertwined on a couch like some tanned, knotted, beautiful sculpture, the repartee between Schneider and Delon during their discussion of the heat outside is not only a scene that thrives on its palpable sexiness, but it's also style at its summery best.

"The Swimming Pool" is available on DVD now.

no. 11, possibly

I'm not sure how GQ missed Luchino Visconti's mesmerizing and bleak masterpiece "Rocco and His Brothers" (1960) on their list of "The Ten Best Guy Films You've Never Seen". It's a solid list and if my masculinity were in question, I would say I fared pretty well having seen seven out of ten of the films. In terms of it not being mentioned in the same laudatory breath as Fellini's "La Dolce Vita", Rossellini's "Roma Open City", and Antonioni's "L'Aventurra", and its issues concerning masculinity and identity, "Rocco and His Brothers" is a fitting description for GQ, but it's also a somber, exacting piece of Italian cinema featuring memorable performances by star Alain Deloin, Annie Girardot, and Renato Salvatore. The film centers around a fatherless family of five brothers who have recently moved from the squalor of Southern Italy to the land of hope and promise of Milan, where they come of age in a time when their country is economically devastated and culturally depressed. Each brother becomes the focus of a segment that pieces together the narrative and we learn their journey for self-preservation leads to a devastating end that as is cathartic and pulverizing as any humanist dramas made popular by the neo-realist movement of the immediate post-war years. Each boy in their pursuit of happiness finds that life is hard and damning and rising above it all can feel insurmountable. This is particularly crushing because their lives are devoid of the fantasy of an idealistic and prosperous home life where their roles as men are clear and performed without familial strife on an everyday basis. At times melodramatic and other times so subtle and succinct, "Rocco and His Brothers" is a movie about what it means to be a man, but often times how that definition can be so brutally arbitrary.