ABSTRACT
I will begin by describing two clips from François Ozon’s film, Swimming Pool. In the first the camera pans sensuously over the body of a young woman, Julie, as she lies sprawled in the sun. It then turns upward to reveal a man gazing lustfully down at her. The two begin to masturbate in synchrony. The image of a middle-aged woman waking up at the end of this sequence suggests these shots represent her erotic dream. In a later parallel sequence, the camera similarly pans over the body of this mature woman, Sarah, a writer of mystery novels, who is sharing a house with Julie while on holiday in the south of France. This time, the shot dead ends not in a scene of voyeuristic passion, but in the static image of the diminutive, withered figure of the property’s caretaker. Ozon stated in an interview ‘I wanted this mature body to seem desirable . . . the main point was that I wanted Sarah and Julie’s bodies to affect one another’ (2003: 2). Indeed, the sequence ends with mutual gaze between the two women.
