One who I forgot to mention in my list of film-related people, but who would definitely fit into the 'like rather a lot but am nonetheless quite ambivalent towards' category, is François Ozon. I always enjoy his films, but am also always unsettled by them - by the dark undercurrents that run through them. 8 Femmes was kitsch, hyper-real, lovely and weird; Criminal Lovers was scary; See The Sea was nothing short of horrifying. With those latter two, at least, there's a great deal of psychology, and Ozon brings some ordinarily submerged things to the surface; maybe one of the most unnerving things about his films is that one always senses (and, having watched one or two in their entirety, learns) that he's a director with no compunctions about following through with the most troubling of his suggestions.
In that last sense, Swimming Pool was a positive relief, for its ending and resolution is much nicer than I'd feared. It inverted my expectations at least twice - once when it took the turn away from the 'repressed English writer..."Sarah wants to swim but it's too dirty for her"...experiences sexual reawakening after encounter with liberated younger woman' narrative expectation it'd set up, and then again with the closing clue as to what had gone before - and the way that it does this adds another dimension to the array of symbolic and verbal clues which form the main substance of the film, overlaying a new perspective through which to understand them. (It also provides a new angle to look at the coolness and reserve with which the whole is presented while throwing into sharper highlight the strong eroticism which runs through it.) So yep, this is a good one.
