What to Watch: "The Swimmer" & "Deep End"

I love it when film programmers go micro, finding a thematic niche and milking the hell out of it. In this case, it’s the Criterion Channel and it’s summer, so we have “In the Deep End: Swimming Pools On-Screen.” Which is not quite so random as it might seem, since there is something about a pool, glistening by day or lit up by night, chlorinated or salt-water or empty, that draws drama to it. (And sometimes comedy.) It’s a liminal space, one on that exists outside of purpose or a schedule: Once you’re in it, you’re away from the rest of the world, with no agenda but to sink, swim or float. (Which makes poolside a liminal space within a liminal space, or a bardo with its own rules of engagement.)

The Criterion series consists of a lucky thirteen titles, running the gamut from rigorous (Catherine Breillat’s “Fat Girl,” 2001) to sleazy (1998’s “Wild Things,” with Neve Campbell and Denise Richards as teenage sirens of suburbia). Jonathan Glazer’s “Sexy Beast” (2000) has Sir Ben Kingsley as a gangster to acid-burn the memory of Gandhi from your brain, and if you haven’t seen it, I recommend you do so. Robert Altman’s “3 Women” (1977) is here on the strength of Janice Rule painting that empty swimming pool, which the movie uses as a sacred space of warrior-woman identity games, and obviously Mike Nichols’ “The Graduate” (1967) has to be included for that blissful, melancholy montage of Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) diving off the deep end into Mrs. Robinson’s arms.

But the two I want to highlight are a movie I somehow never got around to until recently that has haunted me all week and a movie I saw back in college that has haunted me for 45 years.