The shallow end: Francois Ozon's Swimming Pool has style and great performances, but it's a rather lightweight summer fling.

Director Francois Ozon is such a whiz that his wry, subversively sexy movies could spoil the hell out of us. The openly gay French filmmaker broke through to American moviegoers with last year's 8 Women, that whodunit hopped-up on estrogen and directed, so it appeared, by the love child of Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli. But since Ozon has spent almost a decade turning out such nervy, quirky stuff (see immediately Sitcom and Under the Sand, if you haven't already), it's natural that expectations run high for Swimming Pool, his first English-language film, teaming him again with Charlotte Rampling, whose career he reignited two years ago in Under the Sand.

In Swimming Pool, a sly thriller with quicksilver slides into and out of fantasy, Rampling plays a famed, sharp-tongued British mystery writer with a haircut like an ex-nun's and lips drawn in perpetual disapproval; she's an embodiment of dykey photos of such real-life thriller writers as Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell. The dark heart of the film plays out in the south of France, where the inspiration-famished novelist settles into a gorgeously secluded house offered to her by her publisher and casual lover.

Ozon goes along slowly as his drumtight heroine eases into the rhythms of the village, but he heats things up with the arrival of the publisher's hedonistic minx of a daughter. Played by Ludivine Sagnier, she appalls her uptight housemate by swimming topless, scarfing foie gras, and dragging home a parade of unattractive older men to rut with.

Given Ozon's fondness for queer themes, let alone the two stars' prickly charisma in their scenes together, you begin to wonder whether the two characters are headed to bed. Instead, the novelist leaches the girl for material for a new novel, plagiarizing her diary and spying on her trashy rendezvous. Without spoiling Ozon's con game, let's just say that reality and fantasy blur (there's a steamy interlude with Sagnier and a humpy waiter), leading to a near--menage a trois and, finally, to a murder.

If the film packs less muscle than we're hoping for, Swimming Pool at least leads to a twisty finale designed to make us rethink everything we thought we knew about the two women so beautifully played by Rampling and Sagnier. And if the climactic surprise feels like a magician's cheat, at least we've been hoodwinked by a master. Rampling returns to England to turn out a novel titled (mais oui) Swimming Pool--the kind of racy, stylish, and ultimately forgettable paperback designed for reading while sunbathing in the south of France. Similarly, Swimming Pool is a perfectly good summer movie--but here's hoping for something even bolder and more decisive from Ozon next time.

Rebello also writes for Playboy, Spin, and Hollywood Life.