So we rented The Swimming Pool, and it was a nice film, great photography and the story was interesting…also pretty erotic at times. The only problem we had was understanding the ending!
So, was that really the daughter in France? Was the whole thing dreamed up in her mind? Was the…whatever…what the hell happened at the end? Did we miss something?
My take is that everything that happens up to the point that the illegitemate daughter shows up really happens, but all of the events that occur afterwards at the villa are entirely the product of Morton’s imagination.
Morton spends her entire stay at the villa alone. From the time the French daughter shows up, what we are seeing is the novel that Morton writes while at the villa. Morton has taken the ordinary people she has met–the groundskeeper, the waiter, the publisher’s daughter–and used them as characters in her novel, changing them to make them more interesting. Thus, the daughter is altered from an ordinary English teenager into a beautiful, promiscuous, 20-something French girl. The big givaway is that when the real daughter shows up, and Morton is looking at her, we see the French daughter superimposed on her for a moment, which indicates that that’s how Morton was imagining her.
The film might also be deliberately ambiguous, but I didn’t like it enough to watch it a second time to test my theory.
Or think of it this way. The novel Morton shows her publisher at the end is the exact story we are seeing in the movie–the movie is about the process of writing the story that occurs in the movie, much like the first two thirds of Adaptation.
I was going to start this very thread. The ending of the movie was confusing and irritating. I really detest enigmatic endings.
I think that Number Six has it right. I began to suspect something was off when the writer became a willing accomplice to the daughter’s criminality without so much as a passing thought. It just didn’t jibe with reality.