The Pool is a problematic film, typical of recent cinema. The plot moves slowly and this patient pace enables director Charles Smith to successfully set a mood and engages the audience in the lives of the characters. You want the protagonist – a Hindi-speaking hotel boy named Venkatesh – to succeed but the film never tells you if he makes it. It is pleasant to watch but the fact that it is considered to be one of the most outstanding films of 2008 illustrates how much North American cinema has fallen.
The screenplay contains little tension and no denouement. It seems to stop thirty minutes too soon. Relative to recent films that I have seen, it is very similar to Tulpan. Both are foreign language films with interesting non-typical characters but prove to be only half-movies. More and more films have been distributed that follow this model, erasing the unique quality of foreign films in order to make them generic.
Venkatesh gains solace by climbing a tree to observe a swimming pool behind a vacant house. He wants to swim in the pool but does not want to do so dishonestly: he wants to be invited to take a dip. He gets to know the home owner, who seeks to help him out. Finally, when the owner moves back to Mumbai for monsoon season and Venkatesh is alone in the yard but chooses instead to merely sit down instead in a lawn chair. In two hours, Venkatesh has travelled only two metres closer to his goal.
Likewise, I am disappointed to see how The Limits of Control has been panned by critics because the plot did not cover enough ground. It also demonstrates how many new movies are also generic. The trailers show potentially iconic characters in strange situations, there are many jump cuts between unrelated scenes as an announcer reads clichés such as “when you can only trust yourself” and “in a time when everything is changing”, and the tempo of the music speeds up to suggest an intriguing climax. Unfortunately, those who purchased tickets later discover that the trailer contains more drama than the entire film, which is less than the sum of its parts.
In this case, generic is not good. *½