I caught a late night broadcast of this film on BBC2 last night (which, to readers of this in the future, was a few days before the start of the 2012 London Olympics), and might never have bothered with recording it to watch it later, if it weren't for the single sentence Radio Times used to describe the film. The sentence was this: "Film by the director of We Need To Talk About Kevin." And that was all I needed to hear. If you've seen WNTTAK, you'll know what I'm talking about, as that film is pretty much perfect - a finely crafted, nightmarish, intense, economically made, utterly brilliantly brilliant film. So when I saw that this short film was directed by Lynne Ramsay, I was in. So what's "The Swimmer" like, then? At first glance, it's rather arty. Shot in black and white, lots of slow motion, no particularly clear story being told? It all sounds a bit pretentious, doesn't it? But what I found was that in the film's minuscule running time, it successfully managed to create for itself a story, made up of nothing more than wordless images, music and snatches of dialogue from British films of long ago. This again sounds increasingly arty-farty, but it worked for me. The music picked for this film is eclectic, but when stitched together in this context, it somehow works. From the theme to "Lord of the Flies" (the original 60's film of which is given much love to), and some of John Barry's score from "Walkabout", to an old recording of "The Very Thought of You," a poignant usage of Vaughn Williams' "Fantasia" music, and even that music they used in the trailers for "Prometheus" (no, really!), together they all provide the film with some semblance of understanding the mindset of the man who swims. Meanwhile, the words spoken are never from The Swimmer himself, so we don't know why he's swimming, or where he's swimming to. We can only imagine it for ourselves, and the dialogue and random sound-bites pinched from films of old helps nudge us toward our own conclusions about what it is we've just watched here. The black-and-white photography is worth an especial mention, too, as it is just extraordinarily exquisite. Switching regularly from normal to slow-motion, and using many Steadicam techniques, it almost looks a lot of the time as if The Swimmer is certainly swimming forwards, and yet isn't moving at all. (Perhaps this is the point after all?) All of which brings me to the point made in this (ridiculously long) review's title. If you ever see this film, you will either love it, or loathe it. If you love it, you love it for the photography, direction, soundtrack, and its adoration for classic British cinema. If you loathe it, you loathe it for its really really slow pace (almost meditative), its lack of plot, its avant-garde-iness, and its surface pretension. Either way, whatever you bring to it when watching this, that will be what you get back by the film's end...
Review of Swimmer
