I think there are two sides in Ozon's filmography; one is more related with theater and a sort of theatrical fantasy, in huis clos fictions, it is the side of "Huit Femmes" and "Gouttes d'eau sur Pierres brûlantes", and the other side is more realistic and intimate, like in "Sous le sable". The first one is embodied by Ludivine Saignier whereas the other is embodied by Charlotte Rampling. And I believe that here, in "Swimming Pool", he tries to combine these two sides of his career, joining these two actresses and creating a fiction between realism and dreams, in a sort of fantastic huis clos around a country house with a swimming pool.
But I think it is a failure. The dialogues are artificial and often sound false, maybe because they are in English written by a Frenchman, and some second characters' acting is really bad. The story is not original at all and plays with a joke that is becoming a cliché: the invented movie, just like "Adaptation", for instance. This joke may justify the bad dialogues and acting because you can say that the writer is inventing a bad fiction, but anyway I don't find this satisfactory. Besides, Ozon lacks completely of subtlety and destroys very heavily any kind of ambiguity regarding interpretation, with a cheap remembering flashback in the end, he explains the whole movie which was pretty clear after you think of it for a while. He makes all the work that should be done by the viewer, destroys his active work of interpreting the movie and does it in a way that lacks of elegance. In short, he builds a movie around a cliché that he doesn't even transform, and destroys what is interesting about it, the interpretation on the viewer side and the ambiguity. If the movie worths to be seen, it is because it has some beautiful shots, not to many, but it creates some great moving images. To conclude, it is really a mediocre movie with a quite bad story but technically very well done. "Swimming pool" is just technique without poetry.
But I think it is a failure. The dialogues are artificial and often sound false, maybe because they are in English written by a Frenchman, and some second characters' acting is really bad. The story is not original at all and plays with a joke that is becoming a cliché: the invented movie, just like "Adaptation", for instance. This joke may justify the bad dialogues and acting because you can say that the writer is inventing a bad fiction, but anyway I don't find this satisfactory. Besides, Ozon lacks completely of subtlety and destroys very heavily any kind of ambiguity regarding interpretation, with a cheap remembering flashback in the end, he explains the whole movie which was pretty clear after you think of it for a while. He makes all the work that should be done by the viewer, destroys his active work of interpreting the movie and does it in a way that lacks of elegance. In short, he builds a movie around a cliché that he doesn't even transform, and destroys what is interesting about it, the interpretation on the viewer side and the ambiguity. If the movie worths to be seen, it is because it has some beautiful shots, not to many, but it creates some great moving images. To conclude, it is really a mediocre movie with a quite bad story but technically very well done. "Swimming pool" is just technique without poetry.