Behind the Wholesome Image of the Catholic Church ("The Crime of Padre Amaro" film review)

              

              What do you think of when you see a swimming pool? Water, obviously. But for Sarah Morton in the movie “Swimming Pool,” it was not only made up of water. It contained something else.

            “Swimming Pool” is a character-driven film which revolves around Sarah Morton, an author who spent 20 years in writing fictional crime and mystery books. Her publisher, John Bosload, advised her to stay in his villa in France to write a fresh story without any interruption. Then she went there and found peace at first, but that peace eventually vanished when Julie, a girl who claimed to be John’s daughter arrived in the villa. Sarah and Julie really had contrasting personalities. Sarah was composed and reserved, while Julie was the wild one. The latter had one-night stands with different old men every night while the former put earplugs to fall back to sleep. But as these went on, Sarah suddenly got interested in Julie’s life and decided that her new story would be about her. In the climax of the film, Julie accidentally killed a man named Frank. The story went on, and in the end part of the film, you would find out that the real Julie was not the one she met in the villa.

            So who was the Julie in the villa? For me, Julie is the alter-ego of Sarah. She was, in the first place, staying in the villa for a reason: to find herself in order to make a good novel. And what did she find? She found the person she unconsciously long wanted to be – wild, careless and free; so unlike her – and later made her the main character of the novel. Sarah created Julie only in her mind. It should also be noted that authors like her have a good sense of imagery, so it’s not anymore surprising for her to imagine things as if they were really happening in real life.

 Her stay in the villa was like a novel in itself too. Like most novels, she started it by describing the details of the villa. Then, it had the climax wherein Julie (or Sarah) accidentally killed Frank. There was an end to the story too; the part where Julie gave the previously rejected copy of her mother’s novel to Sarah and drove away. And this part probably meant that she already finished her novel and that she is ready for John’s rejection.

Furthermore, Sarah’s concern to Julie was an unusual thing. It was impossible for a person like her to bury a dead man for another person’s sake, unless she was really the one who did the crime.

There are things in the movie that conveyed meanings. First was, of course, the villa’s swimming pool. It was a symbol of Sarah’s lustful desires. I also saw it as the place where she got most of her ideas for her story. It was there that she created Julie’s character. In the first part of the movie, we could see Sarah opening a window. It was not actually the window that she’s opening; it was the book she’s starting to write. And the sights that she saw through that window and the whole villa, including the pool mentioned earlier, was probably the setting of her story. In addition, the mirrors that appear everytime Julie had her sexual adventures signified that it was not actually Julie who was doing the action, but Sarah herself.

Every single one of us, not only Sarah or any writer, has desires that even we ourselves don’t know. Because of these secret desires, we tend to fulfil them through them through different means and sometimes these ways lead to something bad.

I highly recommend this movie to everyone.