Luca Guadagnino (2015)

A Bigger Splash is based on Jacques Deray’s film La piscine (1969) and presumably takes its title from the David Hockney painting of 1967.  Hockney’s swimming pool was in California; Deray’s was on the Côte d’Azur; the pool at the heart of Luca Guadagnino’s movie belongs to a villa on the remote island of Pantelleria, in the Strait of Sicily.  In this drama of sexual competition and possessiveness, it’s hardly surprising that sunlight and heat are an important part of the texture – that they have both a stupefying and an irritating effect on the characters.  As the mood of the story darkens, there are rumbles of thunder.  Eventually, the weather breaks … It’s all par for the atmospheric course but the images of landscape created by Guadagnino and his cinematographer Yorick Le Saux are impressively suggestive.  The naked bodies idling on the poolside are a persistent reminder of their owners’ carnal impulses.  In the early stages, the sluggish movement of the film is absorbing.  It reinforces one’s sense that the set-up in the villa is pregnant with possibility – even though it’s clear that only something bad can happen.

Marianne Lane (Tilda Swinton) is an international rock star, recovering from surgery on her vocal cords and not allowed to speak.   She’s staying in Pantelleria with her photographer boyfriend Paul de Smedt (Matthias Schoenaerts).  Their torpid idyll is interrupted by the arrival of Marianne’s ex-partner Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes), a garrulous record producer.  Harry is accompanied by Penelope (Dakota Johnson), his daughter from a previous (pre-Marianne) relationship.  It soon becomes clear that Harry still desires Marianne and is incredulous that she’s living with a man who, in Harry’s estimation, is maddeningly unexciting.  Penelope finds Paul maddening too but for reasons different from her father’s.  She’s attracted to Paul but he seems unresponsive to her. The dialogue that David Kagjanich has written is often entertaining and occasionally funny.  Luca Guadagnino’s flashbacks to earlier points in the relationships of Harry, Marianne and Paul are rationed and illuminating.  On the crucial day that ends in the death of Harry in the swimming pool, he and Marianne shop for food while Penelope persuades Paul to go for a long walk.  It’s dramatically effective that, whereas we witness Marianne and Harry having sex when they return to the villa, we’re never sure quite what happens between Paul and Penelope up in the mountains.

A Bigger Splash is exceedingly well acted.  As Harry, Ralph Fiennes is fearlessly exuberant and brings off a difficult balancing act.  The man he’s playing is very annoying (the thought of a noisy showoff like Harry invading one’s quiet holiday is terrifying).   But Fiennes, as well as being comedically accomplished, gets across the sad seriousness of Harry’s yearning to repossess Marianne.  His exposure of his fifty-something body comes to seem like a desperate form of self-assertion:  Harry’s still in physically good shape but aware that he’s at a disadvantage to the younger Paul.  Luca Guadagnino makes a successful running joke of Marianne Lane’s convalescent silence (at least until her predictably loud, protracted screech of horror when death comes to the villa).  Tilda Swinton wittily expresses Marianne’s feelings about the doctor’s orders.  She’s by turns frustrated by her voicelessness and grateful that she can exploit it.  The effect of Swinton’s not speaking is to draw attention even more strongly than usual to her physical presence – she’s almost comically commanding.  Paul seems an artificial construction:  this cuddly relaxative recently attempted suicide and is a recovering alcoholic.  Matthias Schoenaerts, with his charismatic quietness, manages to hold the different sides of the character together.   There’s a resonance between the situation of the attention-seeking Penelope and the actress who plays her:  in the exalted company of Swinton, Fiennes and Schoenaerts, Dakota Johnson has to work hard to hold her own.  She succeeds, though:  the final rupture in Penelope’s self-possession – what Marianne has seen as her youthful callousness – is one of the emotionally startling moments in the film.

In spite of its many qualities, I don’t care for A Bigger Splash.  The dislikeable characters and the cunning languor of the film become oppressive.  It takes a long time for the foursome to get, in different ways, their comeuppance; though it’s a clever enough touch that at least one of them also gets away with murder, the follow-up to Harry’s death proves to be an anti-climax.  Outside the police station where Marianne, Paul and Penelope are questioned, illegal migrants are held in a pen; a panicky attempt is made by the exceedingly privileged international travellers to pin Harry’s death on one of these dispossessed.  This outrageous bid for self-preservation would have more impact if Guadagnino hadn’t already pointedly shown Marianne and Harry ignoring television news coverage of Italy’s migrant crisis during their shopping expedition the previous day.  In her admiring review in the TLS, Roz Dineen notes that the attitude of the investigating officer towards his potential suspects ‘turns to adoration when the sergeant realizes that the person he has been interrogating is none other than Marianne Lane’.  But the sergeant (Corrado Guzzanti) identified Marianne at a much earlier stage.   Shortly after Harry and Penelope’s arrival, they and their reluctant hosts get a table at a full-up restaurant in the mountains; one of the other diners spots Marianne and his party gives up their table for hers.  It’s a good joke when the anonymous diner reappears as the police officer in charge of the murder inquiry but Guadagnino and David Kagjanich are milking it when the sergeant reverts to being a starstruck soft touch.  He forces the anxious Marianne to stop her car only in order to ask for her autograph.  Roz Dineen’s grand-sounding explanation is that the detective’s ‘worship of the artist overturns his principles and puts all other thoughts from his mind’.  In the Sicilian setting, the moment rather suggests the tiresome humour of Inspector Montalbano.

17 February 2016