'She threw me a look I caught in my hip pocket," Robert Mitchum's private eye says of Charlotte Rampling's femme fatale in "Farewell, My Lovely" (1975). You don't know what that means, but you know exactly what it means. Rampling has always had the aura of a woman who knows things you would like to do that you haven't even thought of. She played boldly sexual roles early in her career, as in "The Night Porter" (1974), and now, in "Swimming Pool," a sensuous and deceptive new thriller, she becomes fascinated by a young female predator.
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Rampling plays Sarah Morton, a British crime writer whose novels seem to exist somewhere between those of P.D. James and Ruth Rendell. Now she is tired and uncertain, and her publisher offers her a holiday in his French villa. She goes gratefully to the house, shops in the nearby village, finds she can write again. She is alone, except for a taciturn caretaker, who goes into the village at night to live with his daughter, a dwarf who seems older than he is.