The Swimming Pool

The Swimming Pool (La Piscine, 1969) is a French-Italian psychological thriller from Jacques Deray that you can watch online on iFILM. Alain Delon and Romy Schneider play a couple whose idle summer at a villa near St. Tropez quietly curdles into a trap.

Jean-Paul and Marianne are happy enough sunbathing by the water until an old friend, Harry, shows up. He happens to be Marianne's former lover, and he brings along his teenage daughter Penelope, played by a young Jane Birkin. Four people share one house, and jealousy, wounded pride and barely hidden desire thicken by the day. Maurice Ronet's Harry seems to enjoy poking at the cracks. Then something happens at the pool, and there is no walking it back.

Deray films the heat, the tanned skin and the glittering water so that summer itself feels complicit. The tension lives in glances and long pauses rather than plot twists, building a slow, scorching study of power inside a couple. Delon and Schneider were once real-life lovers, which lends the scenes an almost indecent charge. Stream The Swimming Pool (1969) online on iFILM.