Ray Pride

"Do you mind if I smoke?"

"I'd be disappointed if you didn't," I had to confess to Ludivine Sagnier (Loody-veen Son-yay), the scrappy 24-year-old Parisian actress who stars in "Swimming Pool," an almost-too-clever, superficially genteel thriller of twists from Francois Ozon, director of "8 Women" and "See the Sea."

Charlotte Rampling plays Sarah Morton, a Ruth Rendell-type British mystery author who, feeling burned out, accepts an offer from her publisher, John (Charles Dance) to stay at his house in the South of France in the off-season. She falls into the village's sleepy pace, only to be interrupted by John's vulgar, reckless daughter Julie (Sagnier). The increasingly dark turns taking place in the house soon find their way out of Sarah's mind and into her work and murder isn't out of the question.

As in her first appearance for Ozon, in the little-seen Fassbinder adaptation "Water Drops on Burning Rocks," Julie often reveals herself physically, provoking the older, prim character played by the 58-year-old Rampling. Ozon has compared the character to a writer like Patricia Highsmith or P. D. James. "Ever since Agatha Christie, there is a tradition of English women writers who like to describe troubling or horrible characters and situations." He says that "a number of them drink too much, have repressed lesbian tendencies and are fascinated by perversions."

Particularly around the shimmering blue Hockneysque pool, Julie is unapologetically, unselfconsciously naked and it awakes all sorts of fantasies in Sarah. "It's the first question most people ask me in this country," which she calls " Ah-merry-kah." She shrugs, she smiles, her eyes twinkle, she gives Brigitte Bardot the run for her l'argent. As Ozon's younger muse (this is her third collaboration with the writer-director, and Rampling's second), Sagnier is chameleonic from film to film. I saw "8 Women" before "Water Dropping on Burning Rocks," and she seems like two entirely different people; at 19 in "Water," she plays a pneumatically sexual twentysomething woman, while in "8 Women," at 21, she seems hardly more than 16. "I think she's 18 or something like that. I think Francois wanted that ambiguity, to be obvious. That's what he found about me, he found that I was like a, how do you say? Child-woman? He liked that. So it was good to have like a very naïve woman, very young, very ingénue."

In that film, she says, it was a challenge to play younger. "For '8 Women,' it was hard work to get rid of all the femininity, to take this ungrateful feeling of being a teenager sometime, again, like I was 16."

She's referred to having an "artistic complicity" with Ozon, which grew when they traveled together to do press for "8 Women" around the world. But he's also given Rampling two wonderful roles in recent years. "Yeah. Francois worships the older and classy women and all that. I don't understand it; I don't know which one he prefers. I think older women is more representative of his mother, I suppose, and then I'm more the kind of women he would shag." She laughs. "Sorry. You may not write that."

Don't worry, I say, I will. "So anyway," she continues, "he's got two different muses, and that's why maybe he puts them in the same movie. Charlotte represents the older, glamorous actresses he always worshipped. She represents, y'know, like the glory of cinema and glorious actresses. In his movies, Charlotte is always like the pillar of this very realistic and intimate style [as in "Under the Sand,"] whereas I'm more representing the theatrical and conceptual side of his work."

Sagnier's Julie is one idful kid, and her English is richly accented without ever becoming cartoonist, yet her own inflection is strong. She'd acted in English before, but she says that "the initial challenges were physical in nature, requiring a lot of effort. There was sexual aggression to find and use, which demands a rather intense physical investment. Then I had to work at portraying Julie's shamelessness."

We learn facts about Julie as the film progresses, and it forces us to reevaluate our memories of the story even as we watch. "It was wonderful for me," Sagnier says, "The process of creation is something that I feel deeply. When I embrace characters, I give myself up to creation. I know what it mans to imagine someone who doesn't exist, to make it exist, and to make it feel, and then to wave goodbye at the end, to be the widow of something you've created. I really felt that closely, but that doesn't mean it's easy to perform. I didn't know whether I should act like a natural girl or I had to play a ghost. I was always on the edge between reality and fiction. And Francois didn't really help me, because he wanted me to be lost. He really wanted me to be hovering between two sides, and to be, y'know, to be abandoned and defenseless."

Her next role is as Tinkerbell in P. J. Hogan's upcoming "Peter Pan." I wondered how her accent would work for that role. "That is a good question, because in Ste-Stevoh-" Her tongue twists and she can't get the word out. "Agghhhh! In Steven Spielberg's movie, sorry! In French it would be the same problem. In Steven Spielberg's movie, Julia Roberts speaks. He made her talk. But I think it's a good idea for her not to talk. We have to respect her infirmity." She laughs again. Just enough time for another cigarette.

"Swimming Pool" is now playing.

(2003-07-02)

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Tip of the Week
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The day the clown cried
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