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Six months after a premiere that largely failed to impress at the Venice Film Festival, Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino follows up his critically acclaimed I Am Love (2010) with a comically cynical offering, A Bigger Splash. The title refers to David Hockney’s pop art painting of the same name (1967), in which an out-of-sight figure has produced an enormous eruption on the surface of an otherwise tranquil swimming pool, presumably by diving in headfirst. This nod nicely incorporates the fact that the film’s structure is loosely based on that of Jacques Deray’s cult French classic, La Piscine (1969), which sees Alain Page’s psychosexual thriller novel interpreted on screen by a mega-watt cast, including Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Jane Birkin, and Maurice Ronet. Page directly contributed to the story for Guadagnino’s updated version, in which a striking collection of characters collide and shatter after a deluge of devastatingly unexpected twists.
The foremost of a formidable assemblage of current left-of-centre movie world darlings, and Guadagnino’s choice collaborator of late, Tilda Swinton, plays Ziggy Stardust-esque rockstar Marianne Lane. Lane is on vocal rest while holidaying on the Sicilian island of Pantelleria, accompanied by her documentary filmmaker boyfriend Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts). The warm, idyllic calm-before-the-storm that plays out between the couple in the first few scenes is ruptured by the unanticipated arrival of an obnoxious figure from Marianne’s past, Harry (Ralph Fiennes). An ex-lover/producer, Harry has brought his newly-discovered wild-child daughter, Penelope (Dakota Johnson), along for the ride, ostensibly to let her have a real taste of la dolce vita. However, while A Bigger Splash can be startlingly funny, most of it is anything but sweet.
Unsurprisingly, the film’s conflict stems primarily from this spontaneous visit/ambush. Early on, one might even be drawn into slating it as a quirky indie flick in which ‘chaos ensues’. However, Guadagnino and his atypical band of actors have made sure that it resists any such form of strict categorisation. The result is a stunning two hours of hot sun on stones, full-frontal heavy breathing, potential incest, an award-winning Rolling Stones soundtrack, and Swinton’s array of unbelievably gorgeous outfits designed by Raf Simons for Dior. Swinton herself is superb, once again proving her acting chops, her talent only bolstered by having to stay mute for most of the film, while Fiennes excellently straddles the boundary between annoyingly likeable and diabolically creepy. Johnson succeeds in making you momentarily forget that she played the lead role in a multi-million dollar erotic movie franchise that found its origins in fan fiction, and Schoenaerts goes some way to cementing his position as more than a sensitive Belgian hunk.
External to the exorbitantly-wealthy, luxury-holiday bubble, there are background references to the Tunisian migrant crisis, currently an extremely pressing issue in southern Italy. While this helps to define the island setting as more than a nondescript hot climate, it is really the swimming pool which constitutes the central location of the film, and where the crucial action takes place. Hockney has said that his painting is a comment on the fact that it takes two weeks to construct an image of a splash that lasted two seconds, but evidently it is those moments beneath the water’s surface that matter most. By the end of A Bigger Splash, it is all but impossible to misinterpret the enormity of those submerged seconds.
