FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE La Piscine 

The couple is apparently happy. They live in a villa (which is not theirs) near St Tropez. They smoke cigarettes, make love and bathe in the bluest water in film history. A sunny idyll, right? But then another man shows up - supposedly a friend of the two - with his beautiful 18-year-old daughter. Old resentments erupt, cracks open up in the couple's relationship. -Groll turns to hostility and hostility turns to violence.... So simple the premise for Jacques Deray's famous thriller. Everything here seems cliché! But instead we get to see the beautiful Romy Schneider and the handsome Alain Delon as Marianne and Jean-Paul! And when old friend Harry (Maurice Ronet) and his daughter Penelope (Jane Birkin) show up, the sex appeal goes through the roof (and I'm not even taking Harry's new Maserati into account). For an hour, La Piscine is basically enough to show Schneider, Delon and Birkin from this angle and that. Water beads over tanned skin, eyes full of lust (and inertia). Perfect bodies glide through the ultra blue water and loll at the edge of the pool. Anyone driving through Berlin Hermsdorf or Frohnau today will notice these pop-up pools. A real pool, however, is recessed into the ground. Like La Piscine. Only a pool recessed into the ground is luxury, not a pop-up paddling pool. Only in a luxury pool will you meet Romy Schneider! While we, as voyeurs, are drawn in by the film's visual charms, we don't notice the pitfalls of the script at first. Passively aggressive observations, ambiguous compliments and quite incidentally we learn that both Marianne and Jean-Paul are writers. He can't make a living from it, though. Irony of fate; Schneider and Delon were actually a couple. For a year THE it-couple of the film world were engaged, until Delon wrote a one-liner to say goodbye. "Gone to Mexico with Nathalie". And yet the chemistry of the two stars still works five years after their separation. Incidentally, the role of Marianne also meant a breakthrough for Schneider, and NOT as Sissi! In fact, La Piscine is a much better thriller than many think!