La Piscine (Movie)

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    Alain Delon’s Best Performances Showcased in a Retrospective

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    The French star is the subject of a series at Film Forum focusing on movies from the ’60s and ’70s, when he became an international sensation.When Luchino Visconti first saw Alain Delon, he is said to have cried out, “It’s him!” Visconti had found his Rocco, the tragic, tender soul of his next film, the 1960 family drama “Rocco and His Brothers.” One of the founders of Italian neorealism, Visconti apparently didn’t bother introducing himself to the young French actor. Perhaps he was tending to the tears that I like to think fell from his eyes when he saw his future star. I like to think that’s how everyone reacts when they initially see Delon, whose beauty has long inspired paroxysms of rapture.This is, after all, a star whose looks over the years have been described as sensual though also insolent, cruel, self-absorbed and androgynous, a word that helps explain why his beauty — as with that of other men whose looks threaten tidy gender norms — makes some viewers uneasy even as it sends others into ecstasy. (“My mother had to put a sign on my pram,” Delon once said, ‘You can look, but you can’t touch!’”) You may want to break out your thesaurus to find your own mot juste to describe Delon, now 88: A selective series that includes “Rocco” and 10 of his other films (he’s made scores more), opens Friday in New York at Film Forum.Delon opposite Annie Girardot in “Rocco and His Brothers.”Film ForumBorn in 1935, Delon had a rough early life by all accounts. After his parents divorced when he was young, he was placed with a foster family and later sent to boarding school. By 17, he was in the military and France’s war in Indochina. A providential trip to Cannes with some friends in 1957 soon found him in the sights of a talent scout working for the Hollywood producer David O. Selznick, who wanted to sign the actor to a contract but also work on his English. Delon instead stayed in France, kick-starting a prolific career that rapidly gathered momentum. By the end of the 1950s, he had become known as the French James Dean.You understand why when you dip into the series, which includes some of Delon’s most famous films and a few oddities, all culled from the 1960s and ’70s, when he became a huge star at home and then an international sensation. His breakout came when he played the sly, sinister Tom Ripley in “Purple Noon” (1960), a French thriller adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and directed by Réne Clément. Much of the film’s appeal rests with Delon, a hypnotic, destabilizing presence whose stardom was sealed the moment Ripley peels off his shirt, baring his chest. He repeats this bit of striptease after committing his first murder, a distillation of Delon’s startling violent eroticism.The actor in his breakout role in “Purple Noon.”Film ForumWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jane Birkin: Made in England, Forged in France

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      Birkin had a thriving career as a singer and an actress, in both communicating a seemingly nonchalant demeanor that camouflaged a melancholy core.For most of her life, Jane Birkin, who died Sunday at 76, acted as a bridge — an elegant one, with an affectless grace that never betrayed the strains of load bearing. She connected her native Britain and her adopted France, two countries physically close but often at odds. She never lost her English accent when she spoke, somehow joining the two languages into her own Birkin-ese, “the improbable French that added to her charm,” as Le Monde put it. She floated among song, cinema and theater, and she could reach large, varied audiences while also connecting with France’s auteur culture.Her career did not go in a straight line. She made the most of her unassuming, breathy voice in her recordings, and while her unconventional glamour stood out onscreen, she was never afraid to veer off in unexpected directions when choosing roles. She let herself be guided by adventurousness.After a small role in Michelangelo Antonioni’s ode to Swinging London, “Blow-Up,” Birkin left England in 1968 to make a French movie, Pierre Grimblat’s “Slogan.” On the set, she met Serge Gainsbourg, the brilliant, tortured musician, who was in the cast and wrote the film’s score.They fell in love and soon became an It couple, impossibly stylish and cool. Crucially, she also became one of the leading interpreters of his songs, starting with their erotically charged duet “Je t’aime … moi non plus,” and continuing through six solo Birkin albums, released from 1973 to 1990. The poppiest and catchiest is “Ex fan des sixties” (1978); the poignant “Baby Alone in Babylone” (1983) largely deals with the couple’s separation.Birkin left Gainsbourg in 1980, fed up with his drinking and temper, but their personal and professional partnership outlasted the breakup. And despite a reductive media habit of describing Birkin merely as Gainsbourg’s muse, it enriched both of them.Birkin remained loyal to the Gainsbourg songbook throughout her life. Five years after his death, she released an album of Gainsbourg covers, “Versions Jane” (1996); followed by “Arabesque” (2002), an album of Gainsbourg songs arranged by the Algerian violinist Djamel Benyelles; and “Birkin/Gainsbourg: Le Symphonique” (2017), backed by a symphony orchestra.But she also escaped Gainsbourg’s shadow, working with younger musicians and producers, and eventually writing or co-writing the lyrics on her albums “Enfants d’hiver” (2008) and “Oh! Pardon tu dormais …” (2020), both largely drawing from her life.That last record is a good illustration of the way Birkin hopscotched among artistic fields, one feeding into another: “Oh! Pardon tu dormais …” has the same title as, and was inspired by, a made-for-TV movie Birkin directed in 1992 and a 1999 play she wrote and appeared in.Birkin performing in 2001. As a singer, she made the most of her unassuming, breathy voice.Jean-Loup Gautreau/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBeyond her success as a singer — not blockbuster by any means, but attracting a loyal fan base around the world — Birkin had a thriving career as an actress, communicating a similar vibe onscreen as she did in music: a natural, unadorned beauty; a seemingly nonchalant demeanor, camouflaging a melancholy core.In 1969, the year that “Slogan” came out, Birkin had a supporting role in Jacques Deray’s scorching, now cult thriller “La Piscine” alongside Alain Delon and Romy Schneider. With “La Piscine,” and popular comedies like “La Moutarde Me Monte au Nez!” (1974) and “La Course à l’Échalote” (1975), she could have continued to mine her gamine charm and cute accent for a comfortable if predictable acting career. But in typical Birkin fashion, she made an abrupt stylistic U-turn by starring in Gainsbourg’s provocative debut feature “Je T’Aime Moi Non Plus” (1976), in which she portrayed an androgynous waitress who has a rather complicated relationship with a gay man played by Joe Dallesandro, the Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey regular.For much of the 1970s and early ’80s, Birkin alternated between making Gainsbourg records and appearing in mainstream movies, including “Death on the Nile” (1978), which featured the kind of international star buffet that blockbuster movies of the time ate up: Her co-stars included Peter Ustinov, Bette Davis, David Niven, Mia Farrow and Angela Lansbury.Throwing yet another twist into her career is that after Gainsbourg, Birkin was in a relationship with the uncompromising filmmaker Jacques Doillon. In 1984, she starred in his brutally intense, fever-pitch movie “La Pirate” as Alma, who is torn between her husband (played by Birkin’s own brother, Andrew) and a woman (Maruschka Detmers). It felt like a new Jane Birkin, inhabiting her physicality in a way that was almost dangerously unrestrained — and it earned her the first of three César Award nominations.The next year, she appeared in a Marivaux play directed by the influential Patrice Chéreau at his Nanterre theater. Despite her trepidation, her performance was a success, and Birkin continued to appear onstage, alternating, as was her wont, between boulevard fare and Euripides.Another consequential encounter in the 1980s was with the director Agnès Varda, who made the gloriously unconventional film “Jane B. par Agnès V.” (1988), in which, as Glenn Kenny noted in The New York Times, Birkin “retains a slightly breathy girlishness that complements her largely cheery, open personality and her intrepid intelligence” — words that neatly capture Birkin’s enduring appeal. Varda encouraged Birkin to write, and the two collaborated on the script of Varda’s “Kung-Fu Master!” (1988). Birkin went on to direct an autobiographical film, “Boxes” (2007).For Birkin boundaries were porous: between public and private, high and low, art and life. In his tribute to her, President Emmanuel Macron called Birkin “a French icon.” Of that there is no doubt. More

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      in Movies

      A Steamy French Thriller Is a ‘Sleeper Smash Hit’

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      The 1969 film “La Piscine” was supposed to run for two weeks at New York’s Film Forum, but it’s been extended to the fall.For the past 14 weeks at Film Forum, a longstanding independent and repertory theater on West Houston Street in Manhattan, the 1969 French film “La Piscine” has been playing — a run that has extended its initial engagement by 12 weeks, and counting.“Rear Window,” “8 ½,” “La Strada” and a popular Humphrey Bogart series that included “Casablanca” have all come and gone, but “La Piscine” swims on.If there is a film of New York’s 2021 summer, this may be it.“La Piscine” (which means “The Swimming Pool”) revolves around Jean-Paul (played by Alain Delon) and Marianne (Romy Schneider), who have retreated to a house with a large pool outside St. Tropez. Sadly, he only gets one month of vacation. The lovers are unexpectedly joined by Harry (Maurice Ronet), Marianne’s former paramour and Jean-Paul’s former best friend, and his 18-year-old daughter, Penelope (Jane Birkin). Much decadence and extremely French crossover love ensues.Of course, life at the pool is not as it seems. (If you are a person with strong opinions about spoiler alerts for 50-year-old French films, skip the rest of this paragraph.) Tensions mount and in the final half-hour Jean-Paul coldly murders Harry by slow, brutal, drowning. After one of the chicer funeral scenes committed to film, Marianne covers for Jean-Paul to the police, despite the fact Jean-Paul had just declared his desire to leave her for Penelope.Sex, opulence, a dash of danger. Could anything better describe New York’s post-lockdown mood? And then there’s the epic style: Come for Alain’s open-to-the-navel denim shirt, stay for Romy’s Courrèges-designed bathing suits. It turns out, many New Yorkers have.“It’s a total sleeper smash hit,” said Bruce Goldstein, the director of repertory programming for Film Forum and the founder of Rialto Pictures, which distributes “La Piscine” in the United States. “The numbers have not dipped at all. We hit all the right nerves with this.”Ah, yes, those nerves. After more than year of pandemic restrictions, a lot of people, including me, were more than ready for a heavy dose of outrageous beauty. I have seen the two-hour film four times since it arrived in mid-May.“It’s vicarious,” Mr. Goldstein said, trying to explain why a 50-year-old French film starring actors who were largely unknown in America, has been such a hit. “It’s a vacation in the south of France that a lot of people can’t take. There’s also the incredible magnetism and chemistry of the two stars, who were real-life lovers.”The film is classified as a psychological thriller, but to first-time viewers, very little happens until the very end. “Can you believe there’s another hour of this?” I overhead one older woman marvel to her friend near the halfway mark.“A Bigger Splash,” the marvelous 2015 remake starring Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton, which Americans may be more familiar with, maintains the broad strokes of the plot, but, as the title suggests, it is much splashier. In that version, the drowning is an accidental crime of passion, far from the cold, calculating murder of “La Piscine”; the dialogue is faster, the cuts sharper, the music louder.Watching it now, having done a deep dive (ahem) into the original, made me acutely aware it was the very absence of action, the unapologetic decadence, that kept pulling me back to the theater. This is not a film interested in passing judgment on la belle vie.Even as I became more sensitive to the subtleties of the film’s dialogue (“the first swim really takes it out of you,” says Marianne, when Penelope returns from the beach having lost her virginity to Jean-Paul), I remained more interested in simply watching beautiful people do very little. “Tomorrow I will take a long siesta,” Marianne declares, lying on a couch in her bathing suit after a day by the pool. Yes, please.That a film so grounded in the gratuitous has resonated in 2021 is perhaps not entirely surprising. After a year in which New York City suffered enormous loss and its residents lived heavily circumscribed lives, it’s understandable we are looking to take our clothes off and have a good time, onscreen and off.Perhaps, too, there is something unconsciously appealing about the pervading undercurrent of anxiety. Much like the “hot vax summer” that never was, it turns out there is not another hour of this.After returning from Harry’s funeral, Jean-Paul, Marianne and Penelope stand at the pool’s edge. “I will have the pool drained,” Jean-Paul says. “I will never swim in this pool again,” Marianne says.New York will, no doubt, swim in many pools again, but for the moment, as the darker days return, there is some comfort in still being able to do so for two hours at a time. More

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      in Movies

      ‘La Piscine’ Review: Pretty, Rich People Behaving Poorly

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      Alain Delon, Romy Schneider and Jane Birkin are among the reasons this restoration of a French thriller is worth watching.“La Piscine,” made in 1969, is best known in the United States for its remake, Luca Guadagnino’s frisky, borderline frivolous 2016 “A Bigger Splash.” The release of a pristine restoration of the original, directed by Jacques Deray and starring Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Maurice Ronet and Jane Birkin, should bolster this striking movie’s reputation.Schneider and Delon play Marianne and Jean-Paul, a French couple vacationing in a roomy St. Tropez villa whose swimming pool — the “Piscine” of the title — is one of its eminent attractions. They sunbathe, splash and chase one another around the pool as if they were a brand-new couple. As it happens, they’ve been together for two years. The casual nudity and intimations of S-and-M in their relationship suggest an erotic thriller in the early days of its liberation from censorship norms.But as a thriller, it’s a very slow burn. Into the couple’s idyll drops Harry (Ronet), an old friend of Jean-Paul’s and an erstwhile lover of Marianne’s. A wealthy purveyor of pop music, he pulls up to the villa in a snarling Maserati with a surprise in tow: his teenage daughter Penelope, incarnated by the willowy, whispery Birkin.Almost 10 years after his landmark roles as Tom Ripley in “Purple Noon” and Rocco in “Rocco and His Brothers,” both in 1961, Delon still retained every iota of his ultra-sultriness. In dramatic roles, the actor, his sexy sleekness notwithstanding, tends toward a solemnity, and that suits him well here. Jean-Paul, a failed writer who’s now an ad executive, is a sullen puzzle with a hint of menace.Schneider and Birkin do well as independent-minded women who are nevertheless played as pawns by the males. But Ronet almost walks away with the picture. Harry’s big grin is offset by a barely visible raised eyebrow of derision, and his passive-aggressive manipulation of Jean-Paul is chilling.Pretty people behaving poorly in beautiful settings is something we don’t see as much of in cinema as we used to. This is a master class in the subgenre, and one of unusual depth. (Deray worked on the script with the prolific Jean-Claude Carrière, who recently died). In the movie’s last third, Jean-Paul shows a shocking sadism. Once Jean-Paul and Marianne are exiled from their metaphorical Eden, they remain fully clothed for the rest of the picture, and the movie’s color palette becomes more autumnal. Nifty nuances such as these make “La Piscine” a film experience both pleasurable and discomfiting.La PiscineNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. At Film Forum in New York. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More