Film No. 7. 8th film shown Thursday 05/04/07
Lizzie Francke said "Adapted from a John Cheever short story, this is Hollywood at its eccentric best. Burt Lancaster is mesmerising as the middle-class dropout whose nose dive from suburban society precipitates the strangest odyssey. Adorned only in swimming trunks and his startling muscle tone, he pool dips his way across his waspish East Coast neighbourhood and attempts to understand his downfall. Structured episodically, there is an elegant craziness to this satire of sorts, as if it has been dreamt up in vivid Pucci-esque colours after one too many dry Martinis. But it captures the schizophrenic mood of late 1960's America - as one nation burned, another cooled off by the pool".
2 comments:
Even on the fourth viewing this film continues to infuriate and intrigue in equal measure. My current theory is that Burt Lancaster's character, Ned, IS America and his interaction with various groups of neighbours represents the USA's involvement in world affairs in 1968 with the most notable event being the Vietnam war. Ned starts the film full of optimism and welcomed by his neighbours but during his journey his benevolence turns to a stifling protectionism and bewilderment as various groups reject him and indeed physically repel him from their territory. By the end of his journey he is visibly weaker, his head is bowed, the fine weather has turned to storms and he can't even find refuge in his home (the house on the hill-the Whitehouse maybe ?)the doors of which refuse to open.
Of course this may be reading far too much into the film but thats the beauty of it, it is open to so many interpretations.
I love films that have a sort of unsettling quality about them, and The Swimmer has it in spades. Produced and directed by Perry, and screen-written by his wife, the film feels to me a very personal endeavour, rather than a big grandstanding picture. I think it even looks homemade, beautifully done all the same. For all its suggestive symbolism and allegories, I get a bigger kick out of the surface story - a middle aged man trying to swim home. What a great idea. Just that practical challenge alone makes for a fabulous filmic spectacle. As does Burt Lancaster who carries the film single handedly. David Thomson commented, "Perhaps because he leaped and tumbled so naturally, it was scarcely noticed that all Lancaster's movements were beautiful".
His initial entrance into the story is gorgeously shot from above in a single take, where all the majesty of nature is instantly overshadowed by the framefilling 'poisonous' glass of liqour, lowered to Lancaster. Therein begins the themes of destructive illusions of middle-class life that become evermore explicit as the Swimmer nears his home.
The genuine strangeness of scenes like the empty pool, fence jumping, the nudist couple, and the incredible Mantovani-esque score that builds like a horror film, makes it all the more engrossing.
In what could easily have ended up a load of old bollocks, the film actually leaves me with a palpable sense of nightmare.
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