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In Swimming Pool, Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling), author of a popular series of detective novels, is tired of writing whodunits. Her publisher (Charles Dance), a longtime friend, offers his French country retreat for a working vacation. When she accepts, she lands in a mystery of her own.

Her hoped-for solitude ends when his daughter Julie, a stranger to Sarah, turns up. With the face of a twelve-year-old and body of a centerfold, Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) swims nude in the pool and brings back men, one each night, for torrid sex within earshot of the affronted Sarah. Julie's shamelessness contrasts with Sarah's British reserve. It's not long before the mystery writer senses a story in the younger woman. The novel she planned is shelved when she begins snooping.

But Julie isn't the mystery in Swimming Pool; Sarah is, even to herself. The older woman, still striking in middle age, is as approachable as a coil of barbed wire. Her fascination with Julie comes from a writer's desire to uncover Julie's secrets, but also from an internal compulsion to move past her own inhibitions. External events push the two towards a murder, but Swimming Pool is more interested in psychological byways that converge in their encounter.

Rampling and director Ozon worked together in Under the Sand (2000). The new film more successfully works outward from the contrast between Rampling's exterior cool and inner fire. The actress came to international attention in The Night Porter (1974) and Farewell, My Lovely (1975). She always looked like Lauren Bacall's evil twin: tall, angular, with a feline slant to her face. Middle age hasn't altered Rampling's screen sexiness, despite jowls and Sarah's frumpy clothes. Tension comes mainly from the star herself. Sagnier (also in Ozun's 8 Women, 2002), though naked for much of the picture, comes across as a Girl Scout trying to earn a merit badge in explicit sex when compared to Rampling..

Ozon's camera collaborates with the star, spying as she walks through the country house, whose cool colors match her temperament. The director must have taken careful notes of films by Clouzot (Les Diaboliques, 1955) and Leconte (Monsieur Hire, 1989, the current Man on the Train) to figure out how to film an actress who says more with her eyes than she could with the script. Dialogue, in English and French (with subtitles) counts for less than cinematography and editing in moving her inner story forward.

The director can be accused of mere formalism, channeling Hitchcock's French heirs to make cinematically interesting moves without regard for loose plot strands. Not much in his previous work argues for acquittal here. Swimming Pool leaves a few loose ends too, but these seem like one last tease for viewers expecting more of a whodunit, the kind Sarah writes, than a whydunnit, in which motives are always murky. A last minute twist puts Swimming Pool somewhere between `Aha!' and `Huh?' to steer the film into the vicinity of The Usual Suspects or The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, works that play form against content via quirky endings. Viewers may leave the theater confused about what happened; they are advised to remember that Clouzot and Leconte's French approach to stories like this one examine the characters' souls rather than their actions, unlike Morton's brand of police-blotter stories.

I teach this movie to an enrichment class of middle-schoolers. The R rating is undeserved. Despite "language," etc., there is so much kids can learn from watching this film . . . and the kids I've taught always love it. Below is my review of the movie:

In Stand By Me, director Rob Reiner follows four boys on a journey to manhood in Castle Rock, Oregon in the early 1960's. Every step they take on a 20-mile hike to find the dead body of a missing boy brings them – and the audience – to a bittersweet understanding of the importance of one's friends in that important moment when you know childhood is ending. The four – Chris, Gordie, Vern, and Teddy – are losers by Castle Rock standards. Chris is the younger brother of a local juvenile delinquent and everyone expects he will follow the same sorry path. Teddy's father, a World War II vet, abused him. Vern is, well, fat and dumb, a nowhere kid. As for Gordie, he has smarts, but after the death of his football hero older brother a few months earlier, his parents have no emotion left to spend on their one surviving son. When Vern overhears that his brother, another hoodlum, knows where the body of a missing boy can be found, the boys set out to find the body and – they hope – become heroes. But the long trek on the railroad tracks brings other adventures to test them and, more importantly, their connection to each other. At the same time, a gang led by a sneering bully named Ace (Kiefer Sutherland) also decides to find the body and gain glory. Stand By Me puts the boys and the gang on a collision course. What elevates the movie is the tight bond between Chris (River Phoenix) and Gordie (Wil Wheaton). Gordie doesn't belong in this group of born losers. He's smart (he has a talent for writing), and his parents seem normal, even though they are in shock because of older brother Denny's death. Chris too has more promise than Castle Rock prejudice allows him to develop. He is thoughtful, a natural leader, but the town views him as another bad Chambers boy. The movie pivots on the way Gordie's need to get past his parents' rejection of him and Chris' resigned acceptance of his fate becomes a turning point for the two of them. The screenplay establishes the importance of their quest by presenting it in a flashback narrated by the grown-up Gordie reacting to the news that Chris, a local attorney, was killed trying to prevent a robbery at a fast food joint. The older Gordie's memories of that two-day adventure focus attention on its importance in shaping the direction their two lives would take. For Gordie, what happens with his friends on their trip, and especially its outcome, jolted him – at age 12 – into maturity. And for his best friend Chris, what the four confront and overcome gives him the courage to get out of the dead-end rut everybody in Castle Rock is pushing him into. Released in 1986, Stand By Me got an R rating mainly for language and scenes showing kids smoking. Younger viewers won't see or hear anything they haven't heard in the schoolyard, and might appreciate the chance to connect with four characters who aren't much different from themselves. Grownups can relate to the backward look at the importance of friendship at that critical moment when a boy starts to become a man. Yet this is a movie girls can enjoy too; it opens a window on a piece of boy life which is usually closed to them. The friends we had when we were 12 are different from the ones we make later on. With luck, they were there for us when we were least sure of who we were, where we were going. Over time, they may fall away, becoming – like Chris, Vern, and Teddy for Gordie – guys we pass in the high school hall on our way somewhere else. But moments like the ones captured in Stand By Me crystallize us. Memory can always recapture, often sadly, the way they shine.

Director Roman Polanski's The Pianist is based on Wladyslaw Szpilman's account of his survival during the Nazi Holocaust in Poland. A Jew, Szpilman was a noted pianist for Warsaw radio in 1939 when Hitler's troops occupied his country. We watch Szpilman's family wear Star of David armbands identifying them as Jews, then suffer starvation and brutality in the Warsaw ghetto. His parents and sisters climb into boxcars to take them to the Treblinka death camp. He escapes; they don't. Whether his survival means anything is a question this powerful and austere film is too intelligent to answer.

The Pianist is a personal film for Polanski, whose mother was killed in a death camp, and is the first film shot in his native Poland since his breakout international hit Knife in the Water in 1962. That success led to Hollywood triumphs with Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974), films darkened by a sense of evil that, after watching The Pianist, seems like the shadow of childhood experience. (Personal tragedy further darkened his vision. His wife, actress Sharon Tate, was slain by Charles Manson's `family' in 1969. Eight years later Polanski was convicted on a sex charge and fled to Europe to escape prison.)

Unlike recent Holocaust films, The Pianist never shows what happened in the death camps. Polanski almost ruthlessly limits his camera to what Szpilman saw, relying on the viewer's knowledge for historical context. Brick walls rise around the ghetto, German soldiers randomly shoot Jews in the street, and a few ghetto activists argue for armed resistance against their captors.

But one mark of genius is that Polanski's camera is not entirely subjective. His theme is the mystery and meaning of survival amid genocide. Polanski and writer Ronald Harwood embody this theme in a character that evokes empathy but not sympathy. Szpilman's artistic aloofness, imaged in the first scene when he continues to play Chopin in a radio studio while German shells explode outside, suggests Polanski chose this story because Szpilman witnessed events without participating in them. The meaning of his survival when millions died is thus as inexplicable to Polanski as it is for us.

The Pianist offers few moments of personal drama and no character arc. Szpilman's escape from the ghetto is abetted by a Jewish policeman whose earlier offer to join the goon squad of the Judenrat Szpilman had turned down. Outside the ghetto walls, sympathizers and friends who remember his talent leave him to starve in Warsaw apartments, like everyone else in that embattled city. Long stretches without dialogue follow efforts to find food in broken buildings, culminating in an encounter with a Nazi officer (Thomas Kretschmann) in a scene that is surprising, moving, and ultimately as enigmatic as Szpilman's earlier attempts to escape extermination.

In one scene, a singer he knew in happier days looks out the window of his hiding place at the ruined ghetto, pounded to rubble after the 1943 uprising. When Szpilman hints he should have remained inside, she says the Jewish resistance `died with dignity.' Yes, they did, and the pianist understands this, but false heroics are not a choice in the face of the Nazi killing machine. The Pianist gains power in scenes that reduce words to impossible gestures.

Adrien Brody's lean frame and ethnic face limited him in previous movies to strong character roles. The Pianist calls on his real talent. He keeps the movie moving through long sequences when his character is doing nothing except enduring in silence. In one he uncovers a piano and moves his fingers above the keyboard in a mime of a Chopin nocturne while the music plays in his head. Art can be an escape from horror, but that is not Polanski's point; the horror is always just outside the window or in the next apartment if he is overheard by the Polish woman who, later, shrieks `Jew!' when Szpilman is forced to flee.

His performance helps measure the distance between our engagement with Szpilman and Polanski's assessment of the significance of his main character's survival. Entirely believable in the role and aided by careful casting in minor roles (Maureen Lipman, who plays the mother, looks like she could be Brody's mother), the actor becomes an Everyman who depends on luck, pure and simple, to stay alive until the Russian army triumphs in 1945.

Character is not fate in a world gone mad. Polanski's film escapes the sentimentality of Holocaust films such Schindler's List or Life is Beautiful. Its harsh realism and closely-observed period feel turn us instead to enigmas pondered by the late Italian writer Primo Levi: millions died, some survived, those bear witness, let others extract the meaning if they can.