The self-reflexive Swimming Pool brings Franèois Ozon face-to-face with himself.

In the course of Swimming Pool, François Ozon derails the narrative to present two identically shot set pieces, each involving a languorous pan along a woman’s reclining body, then tilting upward to see a man standing over her, staring down, evidently thinking thoughts of the most prurient nature. These shots, one allotted to each of the movie’s female stars, Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier, aren’t connected to the story on either end; They float freely through the plot like smoke through a curtain, discrete but unmistakable fantasies. The only question is, whose fantasies are they? Swimming Pool’s ambiguous finale might suggest one solution, but until then, the most likely answer to the question seems to be: the director’s.

Wish fulfillment plays a substantial role in Ozon's films, most obviously last fall's 8 Women, a (deliberately) transparent excuse to put some of France's most emblematic actresses in the same room. Even if the viewer couldn't actually share the thrill of being in that room with them, Ozon's glee was contagious, like that of a naughty child who lets you in on a prank just as the victim is about to step into it. Swimming Pool goes 8 Women one better. Not only is it a movie born of wish fulfillment -- in this case, Ozon's stated desire to work again with two of his favorite actresses, 8 Women's Sagnier and Under the Sand's Rampling -- it's a movie about wish fulfillment. If that sounds like a creator disappearing inside his own self-referentiality, well, Swimming Pool is about that, too. It's as if Ozon joined his film into a Möbius strip before loading it into the camera.

Rampling plays Sarah Morton, a sour-faced English crime novelist who retires to her publisher's villa in the south of France to combat a case of writer's block. Initially dissatisfied with the house (which inevitably, and perhaps deliberately, recalls the country home Rampling's character shared with her husband in Under the Sand), Sarah begins to find a measure of inspiration when Julie (Sagnier) materializes, brash, unrestrained and announcing that she's the illegitimate daughter of Sarah's publisher. Sarah bristles at the invasion of her privacy, but her revenge is petty, childish: When Julie goes out for the night, Sarah cuts imperceptible slices from Julie's pâté, and steals sips of her liquor, refilling the bottle with water like a guilty teen.

The resonance with Persona's personality-switching is already apparent, and becomes blinding when Ozon shoots one of Julie's drunken trysts through a living-room door, gradually bringing up Sarah's reflection on our side of the glass. Despite his love of artifice, though, Ozon's story has more psychological credibility than Bergman's; even before we meet Julie, we know that Sarah will have to unbind herself at some point in her life. Though her publisher, Julie's father, merely laughs when Sarah suggests she might try abandoning her popular mystery series for a more personal novel, Julie's presence begins to inspire her to do just that, to the extent that Sarah starts sneaking peeks at Julie's diary to come up with plot ideas.

Julie's sexual freedom begins to inspire Sarah in her personal life, as she conducts ever-lengthier conversations with the almost comically hunky waiter at the local café (the aptly named Jean-Marie Lamour, whom Ozon slyly fashions as a bronzed, mustachioed god straight out of a '70s porno). But then, Julie's mere presence is an invitation to profane thoughts. If I've gone this far without mentioning Sagnier's spectacular figure, it's only because anyone who's seen the ubiquitous poster image of her bikini-clad body (or, indeed, anyone who's looked at the photo accompanying this review) is already aware of the extent to which Sagnier represents the most lushly overripe vision of screen voluptuousness since Rose McGowan in The Doom Generation. To say that Julie inspires dirty thoughts isn't quite right: She is dirty thoughts, carnal imagination made oh-so-tempting flesh. The combination of lust and envy with which Sarah stares at her is so thick it ought to be bottled and sold by Calvin Klein. Even the blankness that seems to come across Sagnier's face in close-up just makes her a better surface for Sarah (and, of course, the audience) to project her fantasies onto.

As always, Ozon is tempted to wear his cleverness as a badge of honor, but Swimming Pool escapes the Adaptation trap with an ending that draws on postmodernism without drowning in it. Rampling seems to be the one actress who can conquer Ozon's showier tendencies; Swimming Pool and Under the Sand boast a depth of feeling unequalled in Ozon's other films. In fact, it's possible to see in Rampling and Sagnier's pairing a quite conscious attempt by Ozon to fuse the hushed naturalism of Under the Sand with the theatrical gloss of 8 Women and Water Drops on Burning Rocks, both starring Sagnier. Of course, that just adds another layer of self-referentiality, but you get the feeling that no matter how much you seek out the director in his work, he'll already have been there before you.