Liquid modernity (as Z. Bauman would say)

At that Sunday pool party, where superficiality and melancholy circulated in the midst of the previous night's hangover, banal conversations and simulations were exchanged. Bored, Ned announced that he would return home by swimming from pool to pool, like a hero in a bathing suit on an odyssey through mansions and familiar faces.

The opening of the film takes us to Arcadia, the lush nature of the Golden Age. Footsteps are heard, animals are alert, they sense wonders or threats, ducks take flight from the river and the enchantment wears off.

From vigour to decadence, Ned is transformed during a journey through scattered and blurred fragments of a reality full of empty things, phantasmagorias, simulacra of happiness or moments of a world on the verge of collapse. Always present, it is the body (more than the words) that shows signs of this metamorphosis, from vigour, luminosity, speed... to a terrifying immobility amidst thunder and nightmares: running with/like a horse, jumping, dragging exhausted, stumbling, limping, enduring the cold, offering itself to other bodies that deny it, beat it, attack it or expel it.

Thus begins the circuit of swimming pools, synthetic environments where people gather and offer glimpses of reality/falsehood, superficiality, decadence, alcohol, re-enactments of a society and real/absent characters that populate Ned's dream world, which, despite this unreality, the swimmer thinks he can recover, trying new beginnings that never work. The feeling of loneliness grows between the swimming pools and their decadent social scenography, and the spaces that give Ned back his disturbed and chaotic individuality. In so many episodes, like fragments of this shattered individuality, contrasts and outcroppings of an erratic life follow one another, full of stories and events of which all that remains are distorted episodes and a great desire to be loved and to see his reflection in the water of Narcissus' pool.

Julie, the beautiful and innocent babysitter for whom Ned was a God, still agrees to accompany him through a stage that celebrates above all youth, joy, hallucination, the body in action — between reality and imagination, he touches her, tells her he'll take care of her, she resists, says she has a jealous boyfriend and disappears.

In the opposite situation, another woman, an occasional lover, a barrage of accusations is heard — lies, hypocrisy, cynicism, pretence. Ned laments his lost innocence, his mother, his trust in a safe world — will you come with me for a week to a castle in Ireland? he insists, while repeating that he has to swim home, that his wife and children are waiting for him. 'Bastard', she says.

In one of the pools, completely dry and degraded, there is only the little God Pan, left to his own fate, playing the flute and selling lemonade. Everything else is absence. Ned tells him that he's not alone. He's the captain of his own soul, and they're both swimming in a water that doesn't exist, but that imagination would make it real. It is a very moving scene. Ned says he'll be back the next day and leaves, returning suddenly because of the ominous sound of the child jumping on the board, who knows, rehearsing a dive into the real/imaginary. The sad boy stays behind, playing his flute.

Exhausted, crossing a street where chaos, aggression and indifference meet him in full force, Ned arrives at a public swimming pool, a pool with a low depth in which an anonymous crowd is splashing about. The turquoise of the private pools and their distinct ecosystems were over. Tired, limping, disillusioned, the swimmer is subjected to successive humiliations — no money for the entrance fee, forced to follow rules, inspected to check the hygiene of his feet. In the midst of the crowd, there are people who reproach him, demand that he pay his debts and lament the misfortune of his family. Desperate and in total denial, Ned crosses the pool without swimming, dragging himself breathlessly, and escapes by climbing a rock like someone falling from a cliff.

The final walk is short and hard. Eden is now dry vegetation, hard ground, thunderstorms that fall in downpours and gusts of wind. Ned listens to the children on the tennis court, a delirium whose vision changes with the sound of the ball being hit and the laughter of his daughters. In the background, his long-abandoned house, the windows broken, the door closed.

The body then fades away, shrinking into the shadow of the doorframe, seeking shelter, a womb that is denied him. There is no longer any reason to swim because Ned has reached his inner emptiness, the collapse of the American dream.