The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, February 3-9
La Piscine (1969)
Directed by Jacques Deray
Take La Piscine as an antidote for winter—Deray supplies a pleasure that’s distilled, potent, and only burns a bit. Imagine: a couple of beautiful people, Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) and Marianne (Romy Schneider), are vacationing in a stocked villa on the Côte d’Azur. The house comes with a maid, much marble, an enormous swimming pool, and no property tax; it’s a friend’s place. That’s just as well, since Jean-Paul has given up his literary dreams (and drinking) and taken a job in an ad agency. Marianne seems to be a journalist, but she too isn’t producing much. Possibly just to gloat, another friend drops in; Harry (Maurice Ronet) is a childhood buddy of Jean-Paul’s, and, we surmise, an erstwhile lover of Marianne’s. Brash Harry likes success, and he prefers his victories visible: in the passenger’s seat of his triumphant Maserati is his teenage daughter, Penelope (Jane Birkin): the ideal ingénue. Given this alignment of histories and tanned smooth limbs, consider: who is most likely to forego the pool and jump into the sea; who to enjoy, by way of foreplay, a light whipping; who to drink too much; who to turn up facedown in the water one moonless summer night? Elina Mishuris (February 6, 6pm at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “Jane and Charlotte Forever”)
