Eduardo Coutinho

For the first time, the Museo’s summer cinema programme includes an experimental film section, centred on the experience and feeling of bodies under water. This session glides between the ostentatious aquatic architecture of Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis and Jakobois’s fantasies, fleeting contact and wet, sexualised bodies. Six completely different swimming pools — private, public, transparent, bottomless, indoor, outdoor — all designed for leisure, competition and desire, nonetheless. A journey ranging from the monumentality of architecture to the intimacy of wet bodies.    

Pools, by Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis, turns swimming pools designed by pioneering architect Julia Morgan for the castle of tycoon William Randolph Hearst — the inspiration for Citizen Kane — into a space of play, bodily exploration and queer appropriation, an excuse to dive into a scene reserved for privilege. In An Algorithm, Bette Gordon fragments a series of headfirst dives and turns the sporting gesture into a visual score of repetitions, variations and rhythms. Tony Hill’s Water Work seduces with perspective, reflections and depth — the swimming pool as optical illusion, as an unstable surface which distorts and multiplies the gaze. Cheap Imitation “They Walk and I Walk”, by Rickard Eklund, submerges the camera to capture a choreography of synchronized bodies, a dance suspended under water. Naked bodies that dodge, twist and embrace in a space seemingly with no gravity combine in Gunilla Leander’s All Under. Passage du désir, by Jakobois, closes the programme with a montage in which water is no longer an environment, becoming instead a territory of desire.  

Two gems, from two new voices in Latin American cinema, which swing between families, swimming pools, reencounters and status. In Debajo, a short film on youth by Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor, an abstract yet powerful bird’s-eye view of a swimming pool co-exists with the relationships of a crisis-stricken family, gathered to see an eclipse. Sotomayor’s distinctive film-making of care and affects shares a similar space to the daily naturalism of Thais Fujinaga’s A Felicidade das Coisas. In the director’s first feature film, the swimming pool is not a horizontal basin for swimmers’ immersion; rather it is a huge vertical monolith, a kind of an anti-monument, anchored in the garden of a middle-class family. The film conveys the efforts and challenges of a mother of two children to build a swimming pool in their modest summer house, a mother who, alone, comes up against a hypermasculine world. Equally, the film speaks of family love, and the search for status, with the swimming pool a languishing totem of the Brazilian middle class during the years of Bolsonarism.

In The Party, actor Hrundi V. Bakshi (Peter Sellers) is mistakenly invited to a glamorous dinner party in Hollywood. His curiosity and two left feet lead to one funny mishap after the other. During the soiree he consoles Michèle, a young actress who has been fired by her producer, and the chaos gathers momentum when Bakshi accidentally opens a retractable floor, making the guests fall into a swimming pool. A small hippie-style elephant gatecrashes the party, brought by a group of young people, and Bakshi asks the guests to wash the elephant as it is a sacred animal in his country. The house fills with soap suds, culminating in a wackily chaotic party.  

When Stanley Kubrick was once asked who Peter Sellers was, he replied: “There is no such person as Peter Sellers”. The Party is one of the most widely recognised comedies in the history of film, its director Blake Edwards and the English actor making an entertaining critique of a fading conservative society. The cultural revolutions of the 1960s fit into the container of a choppy swimming pool: people from high society, an elephant, a Russian ballet, waiters, beatnik youth… similar to Sellers’s own identity: an empty vessel that can be refilled. In the film, Edwards tapped into the ingenious actor’s innate improvisation and the swimming pool as a container for revolutionary intent.

A couple of families spend the summer in a country cottage. The relationship between them exposes a crisis. The alcoholism of Mecha (Graciela Borges) and Gregorio (Martín Adjemián) becomes clear, leading to a drift in the education of their children and impacting relationships of respect and affect. Weariness expresses the lackadaisical environment.   

In La ciénaga Lucrecia Martel approaches the decadence of a middle-class Argentinian family. The pool of dirty, stagnant water reflects the economic and social collapse of a whole country, yet reflects more than economic crisis as it becomes a murky well feeding off the pain of those living in the house. An erstwhile space of joy, the swimming pool becomes a reflection of adult depression, resulting in apathy. And the children, especially the girls, seem to be the only people awake in this drift. Barring a flicker of unawareness, the young people immerse themselves in rainwater or the water from the river, in water that flows, but are cautious of getting too close to the swimming pool.

A couple with three adult children live in a modern country cottage. A large swimming pool takes centre stage in a sizeable garden. The property is skirted by a large fence that blocks a view of the outside. Here, the father has educated his children without outside contact, maintaining their belief in a false world: aeroplanes fall in the garden like toys and they must act like dogs to defend themselves from the ferocious cats that surround the house. The promise of going out into the world when they lose their dogtooth is proof of their maturity. 

Lanthimos builds a world that is surreal, comical and terrible. The swimming pool is the house’s central element, a limited, controlled space assimilated like the sea, yet under the father’s supervision. A space of imagination, but with sinister intentions: the children are indoctrinated under the water as they believe in a better world. Far from reality. The swimming pool’s limits are the limits of their freedom, a false state of well-being expressed in the weightless bodies in the water. The liquid element is an analgesic magma with the power to educate offspring under the latent fear of a shark bite.