The Other Drowning Pool
The Forgotten returns! Jacques Deray’s LA PISCINE, starring Delon, Schneider and Birkin, is just the thing for summertime. Watching it in winter could break your heart.
shadowplay
david cairns
The Forgotten returns! Jacques Deray’s LA PISCINE, starring Delon, Schneider and Birkin, is just the thing for summertime. Watching it in winter could break your heart.
shadowplay 
August 29, 2019 at 2:24 pm
August 29, 2019 at 6:33 pm
The Guadagnino remake is essentially dumb trash, but made somewhat enjoyable by the performances of Swinton and Fiennes (the other two actors barely register). Does the earlier film share the same big plot development towards the end? If so, I hope Deray handles it better, because in Guadagnino’s clumsy hands it came across as stupid and desperate.
August 29, 2019 at 6:44 pm
I think it works fine in the Deray: the character is stupid and desperate but the film isn’t. Delon’s attempts at staging the crime scene are silly, but the way it plays out is quite credible.
August 29, 2019 at 7:43 pm
The trouble with A Bigger Splash is that the Schoenaerts character is so thinly written and played (and Fiennes and Swinton so dominant) that his actions come ridiculously out of the blue. A human being with seething passions might be capable of acting in such a way; a mere sketch of a man is incapable of doing so. I hadn’t known, while watching it, that it was a remake, more or less following the plot of the earlier film; it just seemed as if Guadagnino had no idea where to take the story. Still, it was an improvement on I Am Love, and Call Me By Your Name was somewhat better still; at this rate of progress, he might turn out something really quite decent in about five films or so.
August 30, 2019 at 12:31 am
Here’s the skinny on the scandal that enveloped Delon at the time “La Piscine” was released It only served to fill the films coffers even more than it ordinarily would have.
The murder of Markovic remains unsolved to this day.
In other Delon new “Rialto” is planning an October re-release of “Monsieur Klein” — his best film and Losey’s too.
August 30, 2019 at 9:16 am
Now THAT’S a scandal! I had no idea. Puts Le Scandale Clouzot in the shade, for sure.
Delon’s character is kind of an unknowable blank in La Piscine, as his characters often are (he made a superb Ripley for that reason). But he’s a blank with STAR QUALITY, which makes all the difference.
August 30, 2019 at 2:29 pm
That’s why he was so useful to filmmakers as different as Melville, Losey and Cocteau.
I love the end of Losey’s wildly underrated “The Assassination of Trotsky” where the police ask him “Who are you?’ and his dour visage suddenly lights up as he realizes he finally has an identity: “I Killed Trotsky!”
August 30, 2019 at 10:51 pm
Yes, it’s a rare gift for an actor to be able to make blankness interesting. Delon had that gift; for all his talent, it seems Schoenaerts does not. You also need a director skilled enough to sustain that interest.
August 31, 2019 at 11:04 am
So long as Delon’s characters have some kind of edge, or room for us to imagine they do, his sense of Mona Lisa mystery is fascinating.