P. David Ebersole | Swimming / 2010

the breast stroke

by Douglas Messerli

 

P. David Ebersole and Gretchen Phillips (screenplay, based on a story by Ebersole), P. David Ebersole (director) Swimming / 2010 [6.50 minutes]

 

Since his 1994 short film Death in Venice, CA P. David Ebersole has produced and directed a number of other short films and longer documentary films, including Hit So Hard (about Patty Schemel, drummer for the alternative 1990’s rock band Hole), Dear Mom, Love Cher (concerning Georgia Holt, mother of singer and actor Cher), Mansfield 66/67 (about the last two years of actress Jayne Mansfield before her death), House of Cardin (about the life of fashion designer Pierre Cardin), and My Name Is Lopez (a concert and documentary review of the life of singer Trini Lopez). Most of these works were done in collaboration with this producer husband, Todd Hughes. More recently Ebersole published a fiction, 99 Miles From L.A.

    Swimming, from 2010, is based on the long narrative song by Gretchen Phillips, collected in the album I Was Just Comforting Her, and the film’s narrative is related by Phillips’ performance of that song, which begins: “I saw you first at the gym / You were just learning how to swim….” and escalates in the moaning chorus of “Please, please let me taste you, lick the water off your skin.”

    The visual rendition of this song is presented as a struggle between a lifeguard (Dominique Dibbell) and the very butch-like “water safety instructor” (performed by the noted punk rocker/artist Phranc). Both are after the shapely fem swimmer, Teresa Rinteria (Jamie Tolbert), who flirts with the lifeguard, but takes her lessons with the Water Safety Instructor quite seriously, the latter of whom moves in on woman the Lifeguard is frightened to approach.

     The battle between the two of them, lifeguard and instructor, goes full pitch, alternating in frames in which one or the other of them seem in control of the situation as they move in literally to salivate over the swimmer. At one moment, even a male (Ricardo Vargas) enters into their territory, flirting with the woman they desire.

      But the lifeguard, following the swimmer to the grocery store, soon wins her over, as the two of them, Teresa insisting that she needs help with the “breast stroke,” retire to a bedroom wherein they kiss and roll around in pure lust.

      Somehow director Ebersole makes this both a serious lesbian fantasy and a truly comic ménage à trois, all of which is lovingly embedded in Phillips’ somewhat folksy, plaintive song of lesbian desire.

 

Los Angeles, January 25, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).