At first blush—and okay, at a
second, too—The Pool seems like a radical departure for Chris Smith, the
Milwaukee-based filmmaker known for offbeat documentaries like American
Movie, Home
Movie, and The
Yes Men. For one, The
Pool is a narrative
film, his first since his no-budget debut American Job, which nonetheless had the feel of documentary verisimilitude. He
also went halfway around the world to shoot in the West Indian state of Goa and
in the Hindi language, and had the further audacity to cast non-professional
actors in three of the four leading roles. And yet The Pool is still fundamentally a Chris
Smith story, an expansion on his career-long interest in dreamers and outsiders
who dwell on the fringes of society, but possess a certain audacity.
A poor, illiterate teenager from
rural Goa, Venkatesh Chavan scrapes together an exceedingly meager income out
of odd jobs, including working as a roomboy at a Panjim hotel and collaborating
with his much younger buddy Jahangir Badshah on a side business selling plastic
bags. From the branches of a tree, Chavan looks down at the shimmering majesty
of a pool in a wealthy family's backyard and wonders why no one ever breaks its
placid surface. He starts following the pool's owners—a father (Nana
Patekar) obsessed with his garden and his daughter (Ayesha Mohan), a pretty
sophisticate who reads a lot—and eventually he develops a relationship
with them. The father gives him another odd job in the garden, and the
initially disinterested daughter goes off on little adventures with Chavan and
Badshah.
The premise sets up a stark contrast
in class: What could be a more obvious border between the haves and the
have-nots than a gate separating a ragamuffin from the non-pool-using elite?
But Smith never brings the hammer down hard, and he quietly defies any
assumptions about the privileged people Chavan encounters. The Pool doesn't seethe with class
tension—or much tension at all, for that matter. It's a funny,
sweet-natured humanist character piece that looks beyond such distinctions
without entirely transcending them. Based on a short story by Randy Russell,
who co-scripted with Smith, the film has a refreshing sense of proportion
without seeming as determinedly minor or mannered as other indies. It's a vivid
piece of sketchwork.