I think that is a really good film. I really didn't know what to expect when I saw it... or rather I knew the bare bones and so I thought that I understood what t was going to be, but in fact cos of the way it evolved as it went on I'd only got hold of half of it. And what it did in fact evolve into was, I want to say, a literal metaphor. Which obviously sounds like bollocks, but bear with me...
What I'm trying to say is that all of the swimming pools in a row make some sort of pretend river that he can swim along and so the swimming pools are a sort of pretend manifestation of a river or something... but then it sort of changes so that the experience he is having becomes an actual horrible mirror image of his life... aaarrgh, I'm struggling to express this correctly in the way that I want to cos a) I'm stupid and b) I'm a bit fucked and c) I can't remember the film that well.
I suppose that what I'm trying to say is that, quite commonly in a film (or whatever) there can be a thing that we the reader or viewer or whatever understand to be a metaphor..... it's a thing in the piece of art that we realise represents something else and so the story is actually about the thing that it stands for - but in this film, it doesn't stay as just the journey through the pools it actually changes before our eyes and becomes, in the film, literally the thing which it previously just stood for.
The journey through the swimming pools is thus at first a metaphor for his path through life, but then, unusually, this metaphor becomes his actual real life. At leat, I think that I am accurately recalling what happens in the film - and I hope that I am also accurately describing what it means...
Am I on the right lines there? And I am I correct when I say that that kind of change is quite unusual? I think that what I was expecting was that it would not become so clear and so literal, I assumed (probably subconsciously) that at the end it would be a case of "Oh I've figured this one out, the journey through the pools was actually a representation of his journey through life" and then I would give myself a pat on the back and think that I was clever. But here, you don't need to figure anything out because it abandons being a metaphor and goes "fuck it, I'm gonna be his actual real life" - which makes it simultaneously simpler in that you don't have to work anything out at all, but at the same time it's a weird thing cos it sorts slips weirdly from being one thing to another.