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Posted June 18, 2010 to photo album "Summer Indie Counter-Programming"
In anticipation of the release of Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right, Nick Dawson looks back at summer indie hits from years past.
Slide 10: Swimming Pool
Release Date: July 2, 2003
Domestic Gross: $10,130,108
Programmed Against: Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
In early July 2003, two European film icons had films opening at the same time. Austrian bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-politician Arnold Schwarzenegger was back, as promised, in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, while French director François Ozon’s Swimming Pool also featured another legendary actor, Charlotte Rampling. Swimming Pool tells the story of a middle-aged British crime novelist, Sarah Morton (Rampling), who accepts her publisher’s invitation to write her next book at his summer house in the South of France, where she meets Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), the publisher’s promiscuous daughter. While Terminator 3 embodied the full-scale carnage we love in summer flicks, Swimming Pool, like the best in sexy European thrillers, was more about disrobing. Ozon’s film audience’s attention were grabbed by a very striking poster featuring a bikini-clad Sagnier laid out seductively by the titular pool. (“Ask anyone what they think about the movie Swimming Pool, and the first thing that probably comes to mind is the poster,” says Kevin B. Lee in his ReWatch video on Ozon’s film.) The pleasure in the movie is all ours, as Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum observed: “The narrative logic of Swimming Pool slips through our hands like cool water, shimmery and light-dappled, leaving behind the pleasures of summer heat and goose bumps.”
The World's End
We Steal Secrets
Closed Circuit
The Deep
The Place Beyond The Pines
Greetings from Tim Buckley
Admission
Promised Land
Anna Karenina
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Brokeback Mountain
Lost in Translation
Pride & Prejudice
The Pianist
Gosford Park