Moody, gorgeous, complex melodrama and thriller.
A Bigger Splash
Grade: A-
Director: Luca Guadagnino (I am Love)
Screenplay: David Kajganich (True Story)
Cast: Tilda Swinton (Snowpiercer), Matthias Schoenaerts (Far From the Madding Crowd)
Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hr 5 min
by John DeSando
The swimming pool as motif is not unknown in arty films, and the lively one in the intriguing, complicated, and sexy A Bigger Splash is no different in that literary regard. While The Graduate’s pool is a transparent vehicle for displaying Benjamin’s desires and mistakes, Marianne’s (Tilda Swinton) pool in sunny Italy hides meanings just as the dust-laden sirocco will hide the land.
Marianne’s voice is mending from her rock singing, appropriately silencing her when her ex-love, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), arrives at the Italian seaside town where she and love Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) are vacationing. With Harry bringing his nubile daughter, Penny (Dakota Johnson), we know trouble is brewing and it’s bound not to turn out well.
Although that seething danger is the stuff of Romantic melodrama, director Luca Guadagnino and writer David Kajganich apply a sophisticated undertow that goes even as far as Electra and plain old Shakespearean jealousy. Yet it takes almost an hour for that good drama to take off, the first part being a long character-establishing segment that is, however, necessary to explain the denouement.
With feelings unspoken, and pasts hidden from view, only the pool seems ready to accept the naked truth, besides the multiple naked bodies anyway (be ready for a naked middle-aged Fiennes). The sexual tension among the four principals is palpable yet so gently at times brought to the pool and the surrounding gorgeous landscape that you couldn’t be faulted to think that nothing is really happening.
Well, it isn’t really until the last act when it almost feels like a different movie because of the crime element that creeps in like the pauses of the principals’ speeches. With the presence on the sound track of the Stones’ Moon is Up and Emotional Rescue, rest assured you won’t sleep through the crime nor, for that matter, the nudity and sex prefiguring it.
A Bigger Splash is a sexy melodrama that goes even as far as Electra and plain old Shakespearean jealousy. It’s a kaleidoscopic experience of love set against gorgeous landscape and actors. As usual, a breakdown of communication is the ultimate culprit.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
