Review: A Bigger Splash

A Bigger Splash (15)

Italy/France 2015  124 mins  Dir: Luca Guadagnino  Starring: Tilda Swinton, Matthias Schoenaerts, Ralph Fiennes, Dakota Johnson

Italian director Luca Guadagnino’s previous collaboration with Tilda Swinton, I Am Love, delighted the beard-stroking fraternity with what came across as a parodically pretentious European arthouse film full of elegant folks emoting in opulent settings, with seemingly random imagery set to an overwrought operatic soundtrack. Six years on, A Bigger Splash proves to be much more fun, thanks largely to the presence of a full-on, beardy Ralph Fiennes, though it never manages to work up to the big emotional suckerpunch promised by its febrile blend of sex, jealousy and intrigue.

A loose remake of Jacques Deray’s 1969 arthouse classic La Piscine, which also served as the inspiration for Francois Ozon’s superior Swimming Pool, the film briskly establishes that Swinton’s Marianne Lane is an aging stadium rock star who resembles Chrissie Hynde with Bowie’s make-up. Perhaps wisely, we never hear her perform a note of music. Lane is enjoying a relaxing break with her handsome, much younger boyfriend Paul (Schoenaerts) at a secluded villa on the scenic island of Pantelleria, south of Italy, while recovering from surgery on her vocal cords, during which she’s not supposed to speak. The couple’s idyll is shattered by the unexpected arrival of her loud, overbearing, impulsive, alpha male record producer ex, Harry (Fiennes) – “Happy to see me?” he beams, not waiting for an answer. In tow is bratty, barely-dressed jailbait Penny (Johnson, of Fifty Shades fame), who’s introduced as his 22-year-old daughter, though neither of these claims may be strictly true. Boisterously hijacking their holiday, Harry is clearly on a mission to bust up the couple’s relationship.

Guadagnino stands well back while Fiennes lets rip in an amusingly grotesque turn, whose menace-inflected comedy feels a little like a hybrid of his characters in The Grand Budapest Hotel and In Bruges (curiously also named Harry). Relentlessly vulgar (“Is she like this when you fuck?” he demands of Paul about Marianne’s muteness. “Does she write you a note when she comes?”), he gets his cock out at every opportunity (fans of the Fiennes penis will not come away disappointed) and even does an exaggerated Mick Jagger dance routine to the Stones’ Emotional Rescue. An aggressive bon vivant with a hint of desperation and sadness behind his eyes, he’s that familiar boorish ‘life and soul’ you tire of very quickly indeed at any party, making his antics much more fun to observe than endure.

Indeed, this is such an unhinged, Mediterranean scenery-chewing performance that it tends to overshadow the rest of the cast, all of whom perform more than adequately, and the film deflates visibly whenever Fiennes is offscreen. As in I Am Love, there’s no shortage of symbolism – the disruptive Sirocco blows in alongside Harry – as well as the lingering suspicion that we’re being invited to care about unappealing, over-privileged folks, though Guadagnino does seem to acknowledge this with awkward walk-ons for some of the destitute refugees who continue to pour into this island paradise by sea. But he loses his grip when things turn darker in the last act, as the trouble with Harry fails to bring this simmering emotional stew to the boil.