Sun, a quiet villa, and two people who know each other far too well: Jacques Deray's 1969 drama turns a Riviera holiday into a slow study of jealousy simmering under a cloudless sky.
What is The Swimming Pool about?
Marianne and Jean-Paul are spending the summer at a rented villa near St.-Tropez, settled into the easy privacy of a couple with nowhere to be. That privacy ends when Marianne invites Harry, a former lover of hers, to join them, and Harry arrives with his teenage daughter Penelope in tow. What had been a lazy vacation reshapes itself around old history and new tension: glances held a moment too long by the pool, conversations that circle around what nobody wants to say directly, and a household of four that never quite settles into anything comfortable. The film keeps its drama close to the surface of ordinary days — meals, swims, drives into town — letting resentment and desire build in the gaps between them rather than in any single confrontation.
About the cast
Romy Schneider and Alain Delon, playing former real-life partners on screen, bring an unforced familiarity to Marianne and Jean-Paul that the script leans on heavily. Maurice Ronet plays Harry with an easy charm that keeps his motives pleasantly ambiguous, while a young Jane Birkin, as Penelope, gives the household its most unsettled presence.
Context & significance
Shot largely on location in the south of France, the film trades on its setting as much as its plot — sun-bleached villas, long afternoons, and a pool that functions almost as a fifth character in the household's slow-burning tension. It belongs to a run of glamorous, psychologically charged European dramas from the period that treated leisure and beauty as a kind of pressure rather than an escape, and it remains closely associated with the off-screen history of its two lead performers.
Watching The Swimming Pool on Ktime
The Swimming Pool streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, letting viewers choose between a Farsi dub or the original French dialogue with Farsi text. A free K-Time account is all that's needed to watch; the film's page itself can be browsed without logging in first.