Occupy the pool

“Occupy the Pool”: this injunction might sound like a contradiction in terms, somewhere between activism and hedonism. Yet the film makes little mention of politics, or at least not directly. From one morning to the next – day, night, morning and night again – Kim Seob Bonisegni shows some fragments of a group of marginal youths’ lives, in Geneva’s ghostly underground.
We learn very little about the characters, except for the torpor that appears to surround and magnetise them. Squats, bars, petty theft, drugs (not a lot of them), sex (only as a remote hint), dance and music (a lot of it). And more crucially, their repressed, confined and stifled desires. Party after party, bodies come close and move apart to the obsessive throb of techno loops. Nothing exciting really ever happens. In dizzy slow motion, we are immersed into these characters’ search for a bond as they form transitory groups that will dissolve until the next opportunity. Organically, through fragments of dialogue, hints of gestures and unfinished situa- tions, suspended in undetermined places, the film paints a melancholy picture of a disaffected youth, whose sole horizon is the prospect of occupying a sumptuous, impersonal swimming pool overlooking the lake. (NF)Seob Kim Boninsegni