by Victor Pryor
When a movie opens up with Tilda Swinton and Matthias Schoenhaerts lounging around an Italian villa naked and making love in their pool, it seems almost greedy to ask anything more of the next two hours. But for better or worse, there is indeed more to A Bigger Splash… even if, in the end, that ‘more’ winds up not amounting to much at all.
Cinematic sensualist extraordinaire Luca Guadagnino brings his voluptuous aesthetic to bear on this relatively simple story of love, loss, and regret. And while it thankfully lacks the decadent excesses of his earlier collaboration with Swinton I Am Love (which was the celluloid equivalent of having tantric sex in a Farmers Market), there’s still more than enough sexy good times to go around.
In a casting decision that is so on the nose that it somehow circles right back around to being inspired, Swinton plays a David Bowie-like rock star. Her Marianne Lane has retreated to the island of Pantelleria with her filmmaker boyfriend Paul (Schoenaerts), where Lane is recovering from recent vocal surgery. There is much lazing, and much fucking in paradise, and all is well.
That is, until the arrival of Harry Hawkes (Ralph Fiennes), Lane’s ex.
For all the talk of Ralph Fiennes as one of our greatest living actors, it’s kind of remarkable that he still has something to give that we’ve never seen from him before. This is Fiennes at his most abrasive, least restrained, most obnoxious, and yet oddly endearing. Harry Hawkes is 100% pure showman, a nonstop, one man party machine that is relentless in his pursuit of his own pleasure and pathological in his need to be the life of the party. If you’ve ever wanted to see Ralph Fiennes hanging brain and absolutely killing his rendition of ‘Miss Manhattan’ (not at the same time, mind), this is your one stop Party Shop.
It quickly becomes clear that Harry didn’t just come back to show off his newly discovered nymphet of a daughter (Dakota Johnson as Penelope); he clearly still carries a torch for Marianne, and is determined to whisk her away from what he sees as a dull civilian life with the quiet, reserved Paul.
This all ends predictably horribly.
As one of our finest actresses/art objects, Lane is perhaps a too perfect role for Tilda Swinton. But there’s a certain subversive kick in the idea of Swinton playing a rock star who has retreated into herself. The film opens with her taking the stage at some massive concert, with tens of thousands of fans cheering for her. Perversely (and appropriately), the film cuts away right before we see her do anything even remotely performative, but even in that split second of her merely on stage, she carries herself with the absolute authority of a pure rock animal.
But what’s more interesting is that the film goes to great lengths to treat this rock goddess as little more than a romantic object. The conflict between her rock star past and her possibly imminent forced retirement plays out in every gesture of Swinton’s impeccably physical performance (Swinton rarely speaks above a whisper until it truly counts), but she is mostly a passive witness to the simmering tensions between Paul and Harry (and indeed, the complicated nature of Paul and Harry’s past friendship, and how Paul and Marianne got together in the first place, reduces her agency even further). Swinton looks good and IS good, but in this case it seems less a case of substance in the scripting that just Tilda being Tilda.
And for all its modern bohemian sheen, there’s something fairly basic (or perhaps the director would prefer the phrase ‘elemental’) about the dynamic here: Harry is a hurricane of sybaritic hedonism, whereas Paul is a pinched nerve of a man, trying his hard to hold on to the woman he loves and the sense of peace that seems slipping ever further out of reach.
Matthias Schoenhaerts brings the fullness of his gifts to bear on the role of Paul. A creature of deep feelings that always seem to be on the edge of consuming him entirely, he makes even his smile seem wounded. And it’s to his credit that he makes his turmoil almost sexy.
Sadly, the weakest link turns out to be Johnson as the enigmatically transparent daughter figure. For all of Penelope’s icy manipulations and provocateur antics, her character never really coheres into anything interesting, or at least not until her final moments of the story. But it’s a long way to go for a pretty obvious punchline. It’s a decent performance, though Johnson’s charms are far better suited to light comedy than to acting out Lolita style.
But, come on, let’s be real: there’s no shame in coming in fourth place when the other three are Tilda Swinton, Matthias Schoenhaerts, and Ralph Fiennes…
At heart, what we’re dealing with is a fairly basic love triangle story. But under the presumably well-manicured directorial hand of Luca Guadagnino, it’s a delightfully decadent one. In the behind the scenes footage, Guadagnino goes on and on about how he wanted to visualize the concept of desire.
And so he has.
Take away the sex, the sun, the gorgeous bodies on endless display… even if you were to take away all of that, this movie would still be seeped in this gossamer sheen of sheer want. Every image is foreplay.
But also, it’s the fucking. Which is a hell of a neat trick, when you think about it…
Ultimately, A Bigger Splash is more style than substance. But we’re still talking about Tilda Swinton, Dakota Johnson, Matthias Schoenhaerts, and Ralph Fiennes frolicking naked and sexing each other up in the Italian sun.
Substance is overrated…
SPECIAL FEATURES
A series of short, splashy interviews with the actors and director lay out the archetypes we’ll be dealing with here. Plus, there’s a gallery of still photos for those among us who have an Italian architecture fetish…
