SWIMMING POOL ***

If people must do riffs on Hitchcock why can't they all do it as well as Francois Ozon who not only ticks all the right boxes but has fun doing it in sunny climes. Not for him the slapdash suspense of just having a body buried in the woodshed but a deliciously unsettling piece of pop psychology in which two women from different generations, sharing the same fairly enclosed space, find they simply don't get along and since they are played by Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier, what's not to like.

Few actresses in movies have matured as well as Rampling. To think that thirty years earlier she would have been the sexy little minx of a daughter giving some starchy matron a hard time; now she's the matron with a rod of steel determined not to be put off her stroke by any interfering little sexpot while Sagnier has a ball as the thorn in her side.

Since the movie is entitled "Swimming Pool" and since Rampling has expressed her dislike of such places you just know that the pool will become the third character in the picture but which of the two women is going to use it to their advantage and why isn't Sagnier's father, (Charles Dance), Rampling's publisher who suggested she vacation in the house in the first place, (it's in France), not answering Rampling's calls? Oh, and Rampling writes crime fiction.

This is Ozon at his most playfully erotic, taking nothing too seriously but teasing us at every turn. That fact that he does it in such gorgeous surroundings is an added bonus but then Ozon is such a confidently assured film-maker the surroundings hardly matter. A treat.