Swimming Pool

Vacations and holidays have always provoked squeals of bourgeois joy, and understandably so.  When life is about going to and from work, the brain will be piqued by an interlude in our lockstep responsibilities even if nothing productive is accomplished in their stead (permanent vacation, however, can cause the bourgeois mind to soften and fry, as in this film).  You will hear rave reviews of resorts and other catacombs of lechery and wonder what if anything about such a place could constitute a vacation – and then you will remember that for most of us, vacation means a break from the everyday.  It needn't be relaxing or even fulfilling; all it needs to be is different.  The escapism of such endeavors includes extreme sports, extreme gambling, and extreme intoxication, all routinely lauded as irresponsible fun, which of course they are.  Yet for those with an abiding interest in art, there can be no empty beaches and empty thoughts.  Life is a continuous circuit of energy that can be harnessed for monumental achievements of creativity and beauty.  And while life is to be lived, it must also be reproduced in a pleasing fashion: it must shine, crinkle, and bend as neatly as a new tie or punctilious map.  Writers secluded in a humble house are prone to these fits of perfectionism and carry them out ruthlessly (among literary cranks, being disturbed when on a pilgrimage is the most unforgivable of sins).  It is always advisable to leave unbothered the concentrated writer, if only because he wouldn't be much fun even if you did get his attention.  Which brings us to this acclaimed film.

The London tube hosts our first scene, which is supposed to establish character but actually does quite the opposite.  On one seat, avoiding eye contact, is well-known mystery writer Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling), and across from her, cradling her latest Inspector Dorwell thriller, is a devoted fan.  When the worshiper identifies her heroine, Sarah does not so much deny the charge as dismiss it as an oversimplification.  Her name may indeed be Sarah Morton but, as she tells her disappointed admirer, "I'm not who you think I am."  We escape the tube and find our way into the offices of Sarah's publisher, John Bosload (Charles Dance).  Sarah's peer in age and education, John is a handsome devil who has the sinisterly confident look of most devils who appear charming because they never appear afraid or unsteady.  On her way in he introduces her to a younger writer whom Sarah then disparages in private, and we already perceive the film's compass and chart: Sarah's jealousy.  The details of her innermost thoughts are never quite laid plain, but it is rather clear that in their long and successful partnership Sarah and John have shared more than tea and royalties.  After thinly-guised jabs at one another – John at Sarah's writer's block, Sarah at his avarice and insincerity – the publisher speaks the magic, open-sesame formula: "Why don't you confound your critics and write something completely different?"  Is this beneficence or something else?  When someone intimately familiar with your artistic work suggests a new direction, should you take it as a sign of caring or contempt?  Sarah has already convinced herself that what John thinks of her books dovetails with what he thinks of their authoress.  And for that reason she initially rejects his second suggestion, that of heading down to his house in this French town and cracking writer's block the old-fashioned way, that is, with the chisel of creative serenity.  She goes home to her aged father, paces, ponders (Rampling's face, for all its coldness, is remarkably expressive), and is soon met in a French airport by the concierge of John's little haven, Marcel.

Sarah walks around, shops, and generally pretends that she actually lives in these surroundings – a very common habit of writers, however temporary the quarters.  After having made herself sufficiently comfortable, she rings up John to discover when he will be visiting (a similarly unsubtle request was made during their office palaver), but his hemming and hawing transforms her whole body into the brittle sculpture of the scorned.  There is also the matter of John's daughter.  This daughter, Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), mentioned so casually in London, arrives with baggage in tow on one of Sarah's first nights and is not exactly welcomed.  "So," she tells Sarah,"you're Daddy's latest conquest," although Sarah was probably conquered and colonized quite a while back.  Julie is a nice-looking girl if you are not fussy about the neck up; she is also one of those people who squint when they smoke as if feigning that they have no vices.  She and Sarah take an immediate dislike to each other, first and foremost because they are both victims of John's neglect, and secondly because as sedate and conservative as Sarah appears, Julie is voluptuous and in constant heat.  Julie begins taking in the trash, one pudgy, oafish one-night-stand after another, with the aim in all this being, one supposes, frivolous pleasure as well as a territorial pissing – a stark contrast to Sarah's puritanical agenda.  Some critics have surmised that Julie may be a younger version of Sarah, but women as promiscuous as Julie do not become as prudish as Sarah over time; they retain a spark, a flame of lustfulness that can always be detected even when physical pleasures have become rare or just a memory.  That is not to say that Sarah, who is filmed as if she were twenty-six not fifty-six, is completely bereft of sexuality.  She does crave John, and on more than one occasion her gimlet eye caresses the contours of Franck, a waiter at her favorite café.  But she clearly disapproves, verbally and in her mind, of how little Julie values her own body.  So you can imagine her surprise when, one fateful night, Julie chooses to bring home Franck.

My strict policy of non-disclosure prevents the inclusion of further details, but a mystery does take shape that has sparked debate among viewers (Is Julie real or imaginary?  How about the trip to France?  What really happened on that night with Franck?  What about Julie's mother?  Even poor Marcel gets implicated).  Without sounding too self-satisfied, the mystery is hardly a mystery at all.  What Sarah writes about and what occurs may not, at first blush, seem to coincide, yet the story makes sense the first time and is thoroughly uncovered upon reviewing.  Slowly the scenes form a symbolic fist pointing to one glaring irregularity that cannot be explained otherwise.  Ozon exhibits a regrettable reliance on sex to move between critical junctures in his films, with Swimming Pool being no exception (some directors, it should be said, use violence or mawkish sentimentality to the same ends), and there will be moments that the viewer will deem utterly unnecessary.  Yet the camera is always substantive, careful, and affectionate.  It also allows the two main characters to converse at length without boring us or themselves.  So when Sarah states that, "when someone keeps an entire part of his life from you, it's fascinating and frightening," we wonder whom she has in mind.  And I haven't even mentioned what she thinks of swimming pools.

Baudelaire, "Les veuves"

A prose poem ("The widows") by this French man of letters.  You can read the original here.

Vauvenargues has said that in public gardens there are paths haunted principally by disappointed ambition, by unhappy inventors, by aborted glories, by broken hearts, by all those tumultuous and secluded souls who still moan in a storm's final sighs and retreat far from the insolent view of the happy and the idle.  These shady nooks are the meeting places for life's cripples. 

It is mostly towards these places that the poet and the philosopher like to direct their avid conjecture.  One finds there a certain pasture.  For if there were a realm they would, as I just insinuated, disdain to visit, it would be that of the joy of the rich.  Such turbulence in a void has nothing that might attract them.  On the contrary, they feel irresistibly drawn to all that is weak, ruined, contrite, and orphaned. 

An experienced eye is never wrong.  In some rigid, crestfallen traits, in some dark, cavernous eyes occasionally brilliant with the final sparks of combat, in some profound and extensive wrinkles, in these gaits so slow or so twitch-ridden, such an eye immediately deciphers the countless legends of unrequited love, of unacknowledged devotion, of uncompensated efforts, of hunger and cold humbly and silently endured.  Have you sometimes espied the widows on those solitary benches, the widows of the poor?  Whether or not they are in mourning, it is easy to recognize them.  Moreover, in the mourning of the poor there is always something missing, an absence of harmony that renders them even more dreadful.  They are obliged to be frugal with their sadness.  The rich bear theirs out in full force.

Which widow is the more saddened – she who holds the hand of the child whose reveries she cannot share, or she who is utterly alone?  I do not know.  One time I happened to follow for many hours an old woman so afflicted; stiff, upright, beneath a small, second-hand shawl, she exuded with all her being a certain stoic pride.  It was clear that she was damned – by absolute solitude, by the habits of the old spinster – and the masculine character of her mores added a mysterious originality to their austerity.  I cannot know how and in what miserable café she ate breakfast.  I followed her to a reading room, and for a long time looked on as she searched through the newspapers with piercing eyes, formerly burned with tears, for news of powerful and personal interest.  At length, in the afternoon, beneath a charming autumn sky, one of those skies from which regrets and memories descend in hordes, she was sitting apart in a public garden to hear, far off from the crowd, one of those concerts whose regiments’ music gratified the Parisians.  It was doubtless here that the little abundance of this innocent (or purified) old woman, the well-earned consolation of one of those long days without friends, without conversation, without joy, without confidants, which God had allowed to befall her, had gone on for perhaps many years now, three hundred sixty-five times a year!  

Another one: I can never prevent myself from taking a if not universally sympathetic, then at least curious look at the crowd of pariahs who squeeze around the outer wall of a public concert.  Across the night sky the orchestra launches songs of celebration, triumph, and voluptuousness.  The trailing dresses that sparkle; the looks exchanged; the slothful, tired from having done nothing, prancing about, feigning an indolent taste for the music.  Here there is nothing but the rich and happy; nothing that does not breathe or inspire insouciance or the pleasure of living life; nothing, apart from the aspect of the rabble pressed up against the outer barrier, absorbing for free, at the whims of the wind, a shred of music, as they gaze upon the blaze of the inner furnace.  

This reflection of the rich's joy in the eye of the poor is always an interesting thing.  But that day, amid the people garbed in floral blouses, I caught sight of a being whose nobility provided a striking contrast to the surrounding triviality.  She was a tall, majestic woman, so noble in her demeanor that I could not remember having seen anyone like her among the collections of aristocratic beauties of the past.  A perfume of haughty virtue emanated from her entire person.  Her face, sad and emaciated, was in perfect agreement with the great bereavement she bore.  Like the plebeians among whom she now mixed and who did not see her, she gazed profoundly at the luminous world, and listened while softly nodding her head.  A singular vision!  "Without fail," I told myself, "this type of poverty – if there is poverty there – cannot allow for sordid economizing.  A face so noble says as much.  Why then does she willingly remain in a milieu where she leaves such a glaring mark?"    

But in passing near her out of curiosity, I came to divine the reason.  The great widow held by the hand a child dressed like she in black; so modest was the price of admission, that this price perhaps sufficed to pay for one of the needs of this little being; better yet, for a superfluity, for a toy.  And she must have returned on foot, meditating and dreaming, alone, always alone; because a child is turbulent, selfish, bereft of softness or patience; and it cannot even act, like a true animal, like a dog or cat, as a confidant for solitary sorrows. 

Borges, "Everness"

A work (original title in English) by this Argentine.  You can read the original here.

One thing does not exist – oblivion.
And God, who saves the metal, saves the slag, 
Encoding in prophetic memory
All those moons which will be, and which have been.

All is already there.  Reflections stack'd
In scores between two twilights of the day, 
By you, your face in mirrors, giving way
To those it will continue to refract. 

And all is part of crystal so diverse, 
One of this memory, this universe,
Its arduous black hallways have no cease;

Its doors will close just after you, your stride, 
That you may from the sunset's other side, 
Behold the Archetypes and Splendors' fleece.

Pnin

Pnin, it should be particularly stressed, was anything but the type of that good-natured German platitude of last century, der zerstreute Professor.  On the contrary, he was perhaps too wary, too persistently on the lookout for diabolical pitfalls, too painfully on the alert lest his erratic surroundings  (unpredictable America) inveigle him into some bit of preposterous oversight.  It was the world that was absent-minded and it was Pnin's business to set it straight.  His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence.

Of all the queer trades on our earth, you will likely never hear of an absent-minded chief executive officer.  In part because that would render the fellow in question more human; but also because being a chief executive officer necessarily means being the opposite of absent-minded, which does not necessarily mean he is present-minded.  It implies, for better or worse, that he possesses that most ballyhooed of senses, the common one, often in exchange on the heavenly market for all the other senses combined.  He is practical to a fault; he knows the price of everything (invariably the first question he asks); he is a great believer in demand and supply in eternal twinning like some lonesome gulls; and he understands sympathy to be an impediment to good business.  In fact, the platitude "good business" will end up justifying every detail in his profit-hoarding existence, from the food he eats, to the clothes he wears, to the way he says "good morning" to some people and "how are you" to others, and how he's really just talking about himself.  In short, it is hard to be absent-minded when you are constantly conscious of the present and your next greenback.  A portrait in stark antithesis to the protagonist of this novel.  

The first thing we learn about Timofey Pnin, a professor recently of Europe, and before that, Imperial Russia, is that he is sitting obliviously on the wrong train.  It is an American train, a country of which Pnin has been a citizen for a decade, but America and Pnin have very little productive interaction.  We are quickly informed, per the passage beginning this review, that Pnin, a tanned, fit pentagenarian of bulging torso and a perfectly bald head, is not simply one of those college teachers who "had long ceased to notice the existence of students on the campus, in the corridors, in the library – anywhere, in brief, save in functional classroom concentrations."  Certainly, his students, transient entry-level life forms as they are, hold little interest for him (Pnin has a mild paternal instinct that is exhausted on his former wife's child, Victor).  But if Pnin is to be what he is intended to be, that is, a tragic character, he must have tragic flaws, and apathy towards his students – with one pretty exception – will not suffice.  We may begin with his English, portrayed mercilessly and accurately for those long familiar with Russian accents, and his lecture style in his acquired language, involving "his gaze glued to the text, in a slow, monotonous baritone that seemed to climb one of those interminable flights of stairs used by people who dread elevators."  There are then his eating habits, which must be good if Pnin is to maintain the ruddy-cheeked health so typical of the outdoorsman: "The Egg and We [was] a recently inaugurated and not very successful little restaurant which Pnin frequented from sheer sympathy with failure."  And finally, there is the small matter of Pnin's ex-wife Liza, a woman our narrator will tear to shreds even after she has already demonstrated her hatefulness towards everyone except herself.  Her marriage to Pnin will be her first of many (not to say she was faithful before or during the actual union), which might explain why poor old Timofey cannot quite get over his erstwhile spouse:

There are some beloved women whose eyes, by a chance blend of brilliancy and shape, affect us not directly, not at the moment of shy perception, but in a delayed and cumulative burst of light when the heartless person is absent, and the magic agony abides, and its lenses and lamps are installed in the dark.     

"Magic agony" is a triumph of sound, and Liza a paradigm for the sort of mind who needs paradigms and who, instead of equating feminism with dignity and rights, endorses frivolous freedoms, contrived scandals, and something that can be loosely termed sex appeal.  And so, if a man cannot work, eat, or love the right way, if life has so baffled him that he must resort to old habits, however destructive, how can he be expected to get on in the world?  Pnin will throw a party (no students past or present invited) towards the end of our novel that suggests he has always found methods to alleviate his loneliness, or whatever it is that truly plagues him.    

We have not spoken overmuch about our narrator, a certain Vladimir Vladimirovich, because his role is suddenly elucidated during our closing chapter.  It turns out that – well, no, let's not spoil any of the fun.  Far better to enumerate some of the instances of dazzling clarity in the realm of Pnin: "A race was run between the doctor's fat golden watch and Timofey's pulse (an easy winner)"; "He came, a figure of antique dignity, moving in his private darkness to an invisible luncheon"; "The lilacs, in sudden premature bloom, wildly beat, like shut-out maskers, at the dripping panes"; "With the confidential and arch air of one who makes his audience a precious gift of a fruity colloquialism"; "Around the natural basin, Pnin swam in state"; "Pnin and Clements, in last-minute discourse, stood on either side of the living-room doorway, like two well-fed caryatids, and drew in their abdomens to let the silent Thayer pass"; "This had corrupted Pnin, this had made of him a happy, footnote-drugged maniac who disturbs the book mites in a dull volume, a foot thick, to find in it a reference to an even duller one."  You may also notice a squirrel – correctly etymologized from the Greek as "shadow tail" – bounding at key instants in the vicinity of our scholar, as if he wanted to ask a question or three.  As if the squirrel were actually – yet again, I must refrain.  And anyway, what can you ask of a man whose only true possession is sorrow?  

Rimbaud, "Roman"

A work ("Romance") by this French poet.  You can read the original here.

I

A serious seventeen cannot be right.
Sweet eve, to hell with bocks and lemonade,
Cafés so rowdy under brightest lights!
Beneath the green lime trees we promenade.

These limes smell good by good June evenings' cheer!
Sometimes with air so soft that lids come down;
And the noise-bearing wind to unfar town,
Brings forth the scent of vine and scent of beer.

II

And here a tiny rag appears, dark blue,
Surrounded by a little branch's might, 
Purloined by a bad star, which melts into
The dark in gentle quakes, so small, all-white.

O, night of June!  O, seventeen!  We drink!
The champagne sap rises to your head at least;
We ramble; our lips feel a kiss's wing 
There batting before us like some small beast.

III

Mad Robinsonian heart, you've had romance,
When in the clarity of pale reverb,
A maiden walks of charming, tender glance,
Beneath her father's fearsome collar's curve.

As she deems you naïve, immensely so,
While trotting all around her small boot size,
Aware of lively movement, turning slow, 
Upon your lips each cavatina dies.

IV

You are in love: till August month unsad.
You are in love: your sonnets make her roar.
Your friends have all left now: your taste is bad. 
And then one eve your love deigned to write more!

And that eve to cafés bright you return,
You ask for bocks or for some lemonade.
For seventeen's a hardly serious age,
Beneath the boardwalk green lime trees to yearn.