In a villa on the Côte d’Azur overlooking the gulf of Saint-Tropez, Marianne (Romy Schneider) and Jean-Paul (Alain Delon) hope to enjoy their summer holiday alone. The sun is hot. The swimming pool, so inviting and refreshing. The cicadas make for a soothing background sound, ideal for intimacy and lovemaking. All seems perfect until the unexpected arrival of their friend, cynical playboy Harry (Maurice Ronet), Marianne’s ex-lover, and his eighteen-year-old daughter Penelope (Jane Birkin). They are invited to stay over.

Soon the relationships between the four start to sour. The arrogant Harry keeps bragging about his Maserati Ghibli sports car, his money, his success, and his past relationship with Marianne. In return, an increasingly jealous Jean-Paul flirts openly with Penelope, who is not as shy nor innocent as she appears to be. In fact, she’s quite ready to be seduced. The atmosphere gets more and more suffocating and dangerously volatile, as the four protagonists provoke each other in a dangerous game fueled by a potent mix of crystalized hostility, resentment, and escalating sexual tensions. Inevitably, something’s got to give. It will, with deadly consequences.

As he recalled in his 2003 autobiography J’ai connu une belle époque [I Knew a Beautiful Era], director Jacques Deray wanted to avoid making a traditional psychological thriller, preferring a less conventional approach to better twist the rules of the genre. He longed for something more in the vein of Patricia Highsmith and some of Claude Chabrol’s best slow-burning suspensers, with subtle and troubling erotic undertones.

He asked Jean-Claude Carrière (Belle de Jour, Diary of a Chambermaid) to come up with a script using sparse dialogue to better emphasize an ambiguous atmosphere, where a slow pace imbued with furtive glances and long silences would help translate the emotional turmoil of the protagonists.

“I wanted to follow the characters closely,” he explained, “to observe them in their daily life while giving the audience the impression they could second-guess their acts. But the protagonist’s reactions and behavior are always unexpected. In that sense, La Piscine will surprise the spectators.” Deray explained that one of the primary reasons for making the film was the murder sequence at the end, and its shocking climax. “We all experienced at one time the dizzying feeling of being about to suddenly snap and have the irrepressible impulse of wanting to kill someone. It happened to me. It lasted barely a few seconds, and, of course, I did not act on it, but those few seconds were a fascinating moment.”

Casting became a major challenge. Deray toyed with several names, including James Fox and Claude Rich for the part of Jean-Paul. For Marianne, respected actresses like Leslie Caron, Angie Dickinson, Delphine Seyrig, and Monica Vitti were given serious consideration. Until Alain Delon read the script and committed instantly to the project. Under one condition: that Romy Schneider played Marianne. “Without her, I won’t do the film,” he told Deray.

The director seemed reluctant, at first, but was quickly convinced that Romy Schneider would be the right choice after meeting with her. “I wanted a real couple, a man and a woman who ignore nothing from each other and who mutually know what they are capable of.” 

The two actors had met and fallen in love in 1958 while making Christine. They separated in 1963. Five years after their very public break-up, the mythical duo reunited – but the passionate romance shown on-screen was not rekindled in real life.

Filming began on August 19^th, 1968, in a sprawling house in Ramatuelle. In a letter addressed to her friend, German screenwriter Christiane Höllger, Romy Schneider confided: “We started with a canoodling scene, without dialogue, and it looks really titillating but not gratuitous nor cheap.”  To this day, that sequence still illustrates the magical and effortless chemistry between the two stars. At 30, Romy Schneider is glowing. She’s the epitome of beauty and sexiness, oozing a radiating sensuality that matches to perfection Delon’s virile sex appeal.

“My most beautiful memory is that summer of 1968,” Delon would recall twenty years later when asked to evoke the film. “The house in Saint-Tropez, the magnificent light. I was 33, the age of Christ, the ideal one for a man. But there was no more passion left between Romy and me. It was something else, a stronger and more powerful feeling, more than words can express.”

Deray remembers that “at the beginning, Alain and Romy were deliriously happy to see each other again and reconnect. But, after a few weeks, they were exhausted  to revisit the emotions and memories of their dear and tumultuous past.”

Once the shooting was done, the actress wrote this to her director: “You entrusted me a marvelous part and I hope I gave it my best, more even, because working with you allowed me to find a renewed ambition, oh yes. And if I was sometimes a pain in the ass, at least I was a professional one! Don’t forget me. Kisses. Your Marianne + your Romy.”

The film also marks the reunion of Delon and Maurice Ronet, eight years after Purple Noon.

Released in January of 1969, La Piscine has been a French cult classic ever since. Each new generation is enthralled by the timeless charisma of the two mesmerizing stars. Delon and Deray made eight other films together. Among them, Borsalino, and Flic Story.

Romy Schneider went on to become one of the most beloved actresses in France, even more so after her tragic death in 1982, at the age of 43. She left us a legacy of memorable performances under the helm of Claude Sautet, Andrzej Zulawski, Luchino Visconti, and Claude Miller. She and Delon were reunited one last time, for Joseph Losey’s The Assassination of Trotzky, in 1972.