Uptight British novelist Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling) – creator of crime yarns featuring a recurring hero named Inspector Durwell – has achieved success and with it, an older lady on the tube recognizes her and gushes that she can’t wait for her next book.

Sarah visits her London publisher (Charles Dance) with a lot on her mind, and isn’t comforted seeing him consorting with the literary flavor of the month, who tells Sarah that his mother loves her books. The publisher relaxes Sarah by offering her time off at his house in the south of France. Proclaiming she’s “tired of murders and investigations,” she wants to write something different, and agrees.

Arriving in the Luberon region of France, the repressed Sarah loosens up by walking over the sun dried backroads, sitting at an outdoor café and speaking French with a nice looking seasonal waiter (Jean-Marie Lamour), and working up the nerve to take a dip in the pool, even though it has some leaves in it. She is alone, but not for long.

Work on the latest Durwell novel halts when her publisher’s wild daughter Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) shows up. Parading around in the nude and coming home each night for sweaty sex with a different man, the girl quickly becomes a pest.

But the author begins to study her, and stealing Julie’s diary, finds inspiration for a new book. Sarah ultimately becomes fascinated by the young girl, until Julie comes home with the waiter, and their relationship takes a turn befitting one of her crime novels.

Directed by Francois Ozon, written by Ozon and Emmanuele Bernheim, with an English translation by Sionnan O’Neill, this isn’t really a “thriller,” and anyone expecting psychos jumping out of bushes will be disappointed. Swimming Pool did pull me in, and succeeds doing what not many movies can: appeal to both the cinema lover and the Bubba in everyone. It’s wine, and it’s beer. Fargo did that, so did Misery, and so does this one.

The beguiling 57-year-old Charlotte Rampling is in every scene and fashions a tremendous cool here. The country scenery is as lush as in any Merchant Ivory drama, but Ozon uses taut musical cues by Phillipe Rombi to keep the audience off balance.

No skullduggery occurs in the first hour, and even then, you’re not really sure where this is headed. By appealing to the imagination – instead of spoon feeding scares – the movie does a better job capturing a writer’s creative process than most.

Once Ludivine Sagnier pops on screen, I didn’t want to get up for a beer. She plays her vixen fearlessly, strolling around in some variation of topless dress throughout and performing a sex scene that made me wonder where my remote control went.

On a dramatic level, the French tart’s tension with the straight laced Englishwoman is potent stuff, but again, Ozon – directing his first English language film – is very sophisticated in not taking this movie where you expect. If you’re in the mood for an intelligently crafted mystery, check this one out.