We talk about the film 'The Swimmer', a forgotten project of the great New Hollywood era, and answer the questions: 'How to make a perfect adaptation?' and 'Why does a man become a stone?'

Location shooting, heart-wrenching music, a montage of crowded frames, the sculpted figure of the protagonist, and a pool… One of the pools. In the first few minutes, hiding behind the yellow serif titles, “The Swimmer” wants to show everything its creators have endowed it with. Yes, it really hides in plain sight! Of course, during viewing, the audience will discover new circumstances from the life of Ned Merrill, played by Burt Lancaster, but the film itself won't reveal unnecessary information about itself, about how it was made. In this case, the blow equals the swing, and the film had to swing with childlike thoroughness: bringing its knuckles behind its ear.

“Beloved Neighbors”

Advertising agent Ned, at 50 or so, leads a healthy lifestyle and prefers the turquoise abundance of neighbors' pools to the boring walk home. Each pool, of course, has an owner, and Merrill, seizing the opportunity, exchanges at least a few words with everyone he meets along the way. Some interactions are limited to friendly hugs and talk about the weather, while others hint at a shared past and a longing buried deep in the soul. The light chatter about drinking with the Westerhazys is replaced by a painful jab from a former neighbor-loser who has achieved considerable success since their last meeting, and the banter with a charming, excitable blonde who has just come of age is drowned by the news of the death of a forgotten but dear friend.

The diverse company and dialogue situations varying in significance nevertheless share a common logical thread: the “further” Ned Merrill swims, the more painful each encounter becomes. And for the viewer too, since director Frank Perry does not want to inform us of the protagonist's mental illness ahead of time; on the contrary, he indulges him in every way.

Mysterious Wife

In the first minutes of the film, Ned's magnificent body emerges from the brown forest of Connecticut and envelops everything, becoming the main object of the frame and the primary topic of discussion among aging acquaintances. The director does not stop at such “trifles” and draws parallels between the sculpted muscles on the stallion's body and Merrill's run across the show jumping field. The advertising agent finds himself at the center of attention, ambiguously converses with other men's wives, gently reproaches his peers for their rigidity, and constantly talks about what a wonderful family he has. But the time around is not at all summer; some pools are covered, others glisten neatly under the pale sun, forming in Ned's head quite natural living waters, which are named after his wife Lucinda. Ex-wife Lucinda.

Blind Rider

The sad fact gradually but inexorably builds a deliberate context around the film, but only until the viewer realizes that in the artistic world of “The Swimmer,” everything is deliberately and illusory.

Ned Merrill is infidelity, harassment, a broken family, indifference, and bankruptcy, but if you look into Burt Lancaster's eyes, you see nothing but pound shorts hiding the hero's own situation from him; however, the unruly and chlorinated river Lucinda spits out the hapless adman along with heaps of accompanying visual images and bodily states. Lame, chilled, and weakened, he has known the illusory nature of adventurous interest and turned out… not infantile!

Nonconformist Frank Bullitt, warrior of justice Travis Bickle, brutalized Yankee quiet guy David Sumner – a company of “easy riders but raging bulls,” revolutionaries wrapped in banana peels, among which there is no place for Ned Merrill, because it is hard to reproach for “childishness” and spontaneity someone who does not even try to catch his own shadow, but only seeks to expose its absence when it is clearly present. Ned Merrill is a statue; a ready-made character going through his arc clearly not for the first time, but ready to do it again and again, for the “demonic” screen. The “Discobolus” is no stranger to being worn down to a Laocoönian silent scream.

In the interest of fairness, we must admit that the protagonist is not unique in his plasticity. The characters and types of “The Swimmer” easily fall into galleries and synchronous rows. Opening a LEGO “police station” box, a child wants to hold a car with a flashing light, a guy in a cap, and a villain in prison stripes. So, Frank Perry's film is very reminiscent of a Danish construction set with the subtitle “East Coast Vacation”: the movie does not create contradictions within the given parameters. Since Ned is an unhappy and dishonest person, an embodiment of the American dream with a midlife crisis, then the people around him should be simple function-attributes: nicer neighbors, nastier neighbors, a disappointed mistress, and an eccentric elderly couple next door. They stretch in a colorful line, floating toward the viewer as if by clockwork.

The Film Is More Painful Than the Book

What is characteristic and confirms a certain lifelessness and artificiality of all the Abbotts, Hoopers, Forsbushes is their initial iterations in Cheever's story (the source material for the film). The writer was economical in their verbal design, preferring to empty chatter the unhurried and resonant monologues of terraces, estates, and, of course, pools. Plates of pistachios, a golden film on the water, and Japanese lanterns tell the reader and Ned Merrill everything necessary about the owners, while the film does not offer its viewer speaking landscapes of the object world. And does he need them?

In one montage mix with the crossing of a car-crowded road, so much anxiety and culmination of mental pain is hidden that no word of the modestly Yerofeyev-like John Cheever can contain. The literary version lacks that masculinity, those strained orchestral parts, those muscular limbs writhing at the iron fence, that pretentiousness. The film, however, knows that it is being watched and conveys the intimacy of this knowledge to Ned Merrill. Now he needs to convince not only his on-screen partners but also every interested party of his “happiness.”

“Citizens! Brothers! Comrades! Relatives! Where from? How many of you?! When were you all thawed out? Why am I alone in a cage? Dear ones, brothers, come to me! Why am I suffering?! Citizens!..”

Trailer: