There are few films that have haunted me as much as
Frank Perry’s 1968
The Swimmer with
Burt Lancaster. It’s now been more than a month since I’ve watched it (on the
Criterion Channel as part of its swimming pool-themed summer films; yes, it's a genre) and I still think about it almost daily. I’ve always admired Lancaster, a mid-century icon, but this film reinforced just how intense an actor he is. The story is admittedly bizarre. But that underlines its mystique. Lancaster as Ned, one fine hot summer day, shows up at the backyard swimming pool of his Connecticut neighbors. He’s clad only in swimming trunks. He surprises his well-off neighbors, who welcome him and say it has been so long since they’ve seen him. He regales them whimsical stories about life and how, on this very fine summer day, he has this zest to swim. He concocts a scenario on the spot: in fact, will now “swim” right across the valley to his own suburban house. He’ll accomplish this by visiting all the neighbors along the way and swimming across their pools, portaging if you will, by foot, between houses. As he “swims home” he of course inevitably visits other neighbors, lounging by their pools or having pool parties. As he travels – again, only in trunks and barefoot across wide swathes of field and woodland – he is a beacon of goodwill and friendliness. And virtually everywhere he goes his neighbors remark that while it’s great to see him, it has been a long time. The story or theme is in what occurs as he stops off at one neighbor’s house after another. I will not go any further because this is a film the plot of which one must not in any way give away.
Janice Rule and even
Joan Rivers have roles. The setting is an affluent suburb of Westport Ct. and Ned Merrill, appropriately enough for the era, is an advertising executive in Manhattan, part of the gray flannel suit brigade that took the New Haven RR from suburbia each day into the city. The film is based on a
John Cheever short story, so that might give you an inkling into the territory we’re heading. Watch it and this surreal tale will have you thinking and thinking and thinking.
The great Quebec filmmaker
Denys Arcand’s Testament (in 2023) is prophetic given a decision by
Quebec City last month to cancel an historic painting. In the film, a jab at political correctness, protesters successfully force an institution to paint over an historic mural of indigenous people welcoming gun-toting European settlers. "There's a painting in there that's an insult to First Nations," scolds one protester in the film, of course a contemporary stereotype. In Quebec City last month, a city hall painting (left) depicting the moment famous French explorer
Samuel de Champlain meets a First Nations chief, was ordered removed by the city's mayor Bruno Marchand because it was "offensive."
