The new Luca Guadagnino film, A Bigger Splash, takes place on a sun-blanketed Mediterranean isle somewhere between Sicily and Tunisia. For Marianne (Tilda Swinton) and Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts), the place’s very own Adam and Eve, it’s as close to paradise as they can get.
Marianne is a David Bowie-esque international rock star – we first see her taking to the stage in a tinfoil jumpsuit and Aladdin Sane-like eye make-up – who’s taking time out to recuperate from a throat ailment that’s left her unable to speak. Paul is her filmmaker boyfriend and a recovering alcoholic, also in need of a break from reality. The real world is a three-hour flight away: here, they can swim, sunbathe, rub each other in therapeutic mud, and make love to their hearts’ content. It’s positively Edenic. Enter, right on cue, the forbidden fruit.
One morning, Marianne’s former record producer and lover Harry (Ralph Fiennes) turns up at the airport with Penelope (Dakota Johnson) on his arm. This attractive young woman isn’t his new squeeze, but a recently discovered daughter from a previous fling – although from the way she gazes into her father’s eyes a little too adoringly, you’d be forgiven for assuming otherwise. The purpose of Harry’s visit isn’t clear at first – but it stirs up passions old and new, and Marianne and Paul’s languorous duet becomes a free-jazz jamming session of intrigue, jealousy and passion.
Guadagnino probably wouldn’t welcome the comparison, as he’s a self-declared outsider in the chic new wave of Italian filmmakers that also includes Paolo Sorrentino, Matteo Garrone and Piero Messina. But A Bigger Splash shares an idle, ennui-stricken soul with Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty – it’s a shameless return to the style-drenched Italian cinema of 50 years ago, albeit the simmering Antonioni mood piece sort, rather than a no-holds-barred Fellini jamboree.
Guadagnino and his screenwriter David Kajganich have based their film on Jacques Deray’s 1960s Alain Delon-starring cinephile curio La Piscine – though its title, which nods at David Hockney’s famous painting of a dead-flat swimming pool disturbed by an invisible diver, better captures its atmosphere of shimmering surfaces and brooding, obscured threat. I’ll confess to finding Guadagnino’s widely acclaimed previous film, the swoony romance I Am Love, a little too carefully styled – but this is the real, blood-surging deal.
The casting is immaculate, which helps. Marianne’s throat condition means she can’t say much, which Swinton brilliantly turns to her advantage – she puts over entire monologues in glares and glances, often just sitting there and more or less glowing her thoughts directly at the audience. Schoenaerts plays Paul with the same deeply sublimated discomfort that made his Gabriel Oak in last year’s Far from the Madding Crowd adaptation so compelling, while Dakota Johnson brings 50 shades of acid-tipped flirtatiousness to Penelope.
Then there’s Fiennes, who is simply magnificent as Harry, a rapturous alpha-prat who swans around with his linen shirts unbuttoned to the navel, recounts past recording-studio war stories ad nauseum (Marianne amusingly mouths along with a familiar Rolling Stones anecdote), and elevates dad-dancing to performance art.
His performance is stand-up-and-wolf-whistle brilliant, and draws out a tragic desperation from this hilarious figure with total commitment and needle-accurate technique. Perhaps after the triumph of his M. Gustave in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel and abrilliant supporting turn in the Coen brothers’ Hail, Caesar! next month, we are in the middle of a Fiennes renaissance, in which the actor will be able to explore his previously untapped talent for skewed comedy. Certainly his work here breezily outstrips that of the nominees in the lead and supporting actor categories at the Baftas this coming Sunday.
But Guadagnino keeps everything in balance – and Harry’s own multifarious issues are only part of a complex and finely shaded bigger picture, which includes an influx of Tunisian refugees that provides a sly political context, and snakes that slither symbolically out of the bushes. It’s a tempting feast for the eyes and mind alike, with an aftertaste that lingers like the whip-crack sting of grappa on the tongue.
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