Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Swimming Pool
1969 · Jacques Deray · The Swimming Pool on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how often you watch someone else watching. (camera)
Tarbès frames wide shots that catch several characters at once, so you keep registering who is looking at whom instead of just what they're doing.
Payoff: You are always watching someone watch, one remove from the actual scene in front of you. In the reading: dicisign. The reading calls this a dicisign: a shot that makes you feel the camera perceiving someone else's act of perceiving.
Notice how much screen time the pool itself gets. (setting)
Tarbès photographs the water's surface, fractured by light, with the same attention he gives the actors' bodies, so it is almost always somewhere in frame.
Payoff: The pool starts to feel like a fifth character, present in nearly every scene whether anyone is swimming or not. In the reading: symbol. The reading calls this a symbol: one object condensing the film's whole mix of pleasure and danger into a single shimmering plane.
Notice three people visible in frame while one looks away. (staging)
Deray repeatedly composes shots with three of the four principals in view, so you can read who is watching, who is watched, and who is left out.
Payoff: The desire and the exclusion are both visible in the blocking, with no line of dialogue needed to explain either.
Listen for the water and cicadas instead of music. (sound)
Legrand's score is used sparingly, and long stretches run on nothing but ambient sound, water, cicadas, the clatter of a meal.
Payoff: The quiet lets the atmosphere carry the unease instead of a score doing the work for you.
Watch Jean-Paul's stillness for a barely perceptible tightening. (performance)
Delon plays jealousy as something almost too small to name, a controlled, reptilian quiet rather than any outward flare of temper.
Payoff: The stillness reads as more dangerous than shouting would, because you can't tell exactly when it's about to break.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch who is watching whom in every scene; the pool just holds what the looks have already decided.