Take a dip in some of cinema’s most memorable swimming pools—those uncanny, aqueous environs where interior collides with exterior, the private flirts with the public, and time seems suspended above the watermark. Serving variously as sites of adolescent sexual awakening in coming-of-age portraits like Deep End and Water Lilies, symbols of suburban middle-class malaise in New Hollywood touchstones like The Graduate and The Swimmer, and dangerously seductive backdrops for sun-splashed thrillers such as La piscine and Sexy Beast, swimming pools have proven uniquely cinematic settings—by turns glamorous, unsettling, sensuous, and surreal stages for provocatively charged, heightened human drama.
The Graduate, Mike Nichols, 1967
The Swimmer, Frank Perry, 1968
La piscine, Jacques Deray, 1969
Deep End, Jerzy Skolimowski, 1970
A Bigger Splash, Jack Hazan, 1973
A Poem Is a Naked Person, Les Blank, 1974
3 Women, Robert Altman, 1977
Wild Things, John McNaughton, 1998
La Ciénaga, Lucrecia Martel, 2001
Fat Girl, Catherine Breillat, 2001
Sexy Beast, Jonathan Glazer, 2000
Water Lilies, Céline Sciamma, 2007