Dir: Luca Guadagnino | Cast: Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnson, Matthias Schoenaerts, Ralph Fiennes, Aurore Clément
Paolo Sorrentino, Piero Messina and Luca Guadagnino: the Southerners seem to be making the most interesting Italian films at the moment and using their native towns and villages as the cinematic backdrop to their narratives.
But revisiting this Venice 2015 feature ten years after it premiered at Venice Film Festival, and now showing on MuBi, I found this sophomore outing pretentious and poorly directed by the Sicilian filmmaker despite a brilliant casting of Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes. Since Guadagnino has improved his craft in leaps and bounds with dramas like Call Me By Your Name and Challengers. That all said, Dakota Johnson (Penelope) is still being cast as a ditzy ingenue and needs to move on to move meaty material.
A Bigger Splash is set in the volcanic island of Pantelleria – nearer to Tunisia than to Sicily, it is a wild and wild place popular amongst the Italian elite for its hots springs and therapeutic mud – a suitable place for a re-make of Jacques Deray’s sixties psychodrama.
Guadagnino’s regular collaborator Tilda Swinton is an inspired choice as Marianne, a jaded rock star and a cross between Eve, her Only Lovers Left Alive character, and weirdly, David Bowie. Wise and witty, she is a statuesque and sexy heroine with an aristocratic swagger and is there with sensitive hunk Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) who keeps her satisfied in their deserted villa, where she has come to rest her voice, after surgery.
But the peace is shattered by the unexpected arrival of Ralph Fiennes, who plays Harry, an all-singing, all-dancing producer whose glib one-upmanship makes you exhausted just to look at him. Harry is Tilda’s ex and clearly still carries a candle for her. To up the ante he arrives with a trailer-trash sexbomb Penelope Johnson) who is apparently his daughter.
And so begins a game of cat and mouse amongst the geezas and rock pools, cleverly acted by Fiennes and Swinton and scripted by American writer David Kajganich (True Story).
Harry is desperate to be alone with Marianne and leave their younger counterparts to amuse themselves. So after pleasuring Marianne with some impromptu oral sex, Paul wanders off with Penelope: it transpires there is no chemistry in the pairing and so they drift silently into the hinterland while we are entertained royally by the more captivating couple – Marianne and Harry.
Marianne’s voiceless whisper throws the emphasis onto her physical allure and poise and she rocks some stylishly provocative outfits and eye-make-up that is a legend in its own lunchtime – rivalling that of Liz Taylor in Cleopatra.
Tilda Swinton is clearly the uber-frau of the drama. Not only does her chemistry boil over with Schoenaerts: she also shares a simmering connection with Fiennes kicking Dakota Johnson firmly into touch.
There is much pleasure in seeing a mature woman knock the younger one into a cocked hat, especially when the elder is Tilda Swinton, whose beauty and style is arguably unparalleled (then in her mid-fifties).
Fiennes gives another extraordinarily entertaining comic performance to rival that in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Suave and sardonic by turns, he sports a torso taut and tanned by the Italian sun. Although there is a vague immigration theme bubbling in the background to give it gravity, Guadagnino treats this with such levity that it is almost blown away by the more-scene grabbing social whirl.
A Bigger Splash is well written and also benefits from a rare appearance from Aurore Clement notable for her role in Paris,Texas. Nowadays it feels fatuous and dated, despite its visual allure but the serious migrant story that is still worthy of attention today. @MeredithTaylor
NOW ON MUBI | REVIEWED AT THE VENICE FILM FESTIVAL 2015
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