Luca Guadagnino assembles a very intimidating quartet for this chamber piece of sexual tension. It’s a very stylish and engaged remake of Jacques Deray’s 1969 psychological thriller La Piscine (The Swimming Pool). The new title brings in the swoony blueness of David Hockney’s painting and alludes also to the unsubtle male competition at work in these poolside encounters.
Wealthy and worldly, his characters are broadly the same as in the 1969 film, which is transplanted from the South of France setting to the Italian island of Pantelleria off the Sicilian coast. The action takes place in a gorgeous villa with a swimming pool, way up in the hills and far from the harbour where increasing numbers of migrants are being held. Tilda Swinton plays Marianne, a globally famous rock star currently in retreat from the madness of her world, happily vacationing with her partner, Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts), a would-be documentary film-maker. They are both wounded in some way, but happy in each other’s company.
Then a catastrophe happens. Marianne’s ex-lover shows up on the island: a record producer called Harry. Ralph Fiennes squeezes every last drop from this juicy role. Harry is an old-style alpha male; a toxic narcissist and exhibitionist, bipolar without the down phase, unable to stop talking, hell-raising and getting his kit off for skinny dips in the pool. His jealous rage at Marianne’s new happiness is displaced into fanatical, almost psychopathic bonhomie. Yet Marianne can’t help having feelings for him and a nostalgia for their past wild times. Matthias Schoenaerts intelligently conveys the way Paul feels constrained by gratitude and good manners – Harry actually introduced him to Marianne. And to make things even more difficult, Harry has brought along his outrageously sexy and poutingly entitled daughter Penelope, played by Dakota Johnson. There is still a spark between Marianne and Harry; no less of one between Paul and Penelope.
Guadagnino elegantly draws on influences from fact and fiction: Harry is a former acquaintance of the Rolling Stones and the movie refers to Brian Jones in an early interview scene. The body in the swimming pool perhaps connotes the terrible guilt and shame with which gilded youth and gilded middle age pay for their pleasures. François Ozon’s 2003 movie Swimming Pool used the artificial blue depths of the pool to incubate a similar tension. A Bigger Splash has something of the erotic languor and implied daddy-daughter issues of Françoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse – the complicated four-way nexus of desire even reminded me a little of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Spell.
The real technical brilliance is arguably in the opening 30 minutes, and maybe it is a flaw that the film can’t maintain that level of virtuosity throughout. Some superbly juxtaposed wordless scenes take us from Marianne’s former life to her current situation and finally explain why they are happening in almost complete silence. Harry’s arrival on a plane is surreally announced by the jet’s shadow passing ominously over Marianne and Paul’s reclining bodies. Keeping Swinton away from his camera at first, Guadagnino finally gives us some breathtaking closeups of her face; given a new inscrutability with its slanted eye makeup. There are some great direct sightlines into camera and point-of-view shifts.
That insufferable hedonist Harry is forever showing the group a good time; forever making everyone take second place to the good time he is having. While they are out mingling with the crowds at a local festival, Harry toe-curlingly insists on taking Marianne to a bar with a karaoke machine, dangerously forcing her to be on display, like a drug-dealer getting a former customer to tumble back off the wagon, exploiting her celebrity and feeding off it.
The swimming pool is a secular temple of near-nakedness, and sex perfumes everything like the tang of chlorine. Of course, the simmering and smouldering are heading one way, and another sort of movie might simply have concluded with the denouement. But this gives us an intriguing, drawn-out coda in which a new layer of malign dysfunction is revealed. The story begins to resemble something by Ruth Rendell, as filmed by Chabrol.
This is a terrifically assured switch to English-language film-making from Guadagnino, and like his interesting but faintly overvalued movie I Am Love, it has something of the drifting ennui of Antonioni. He is surely coming to rival Paolo Sorrentino as an Italian auteur on the world stage. His swimming pool is a pure rectangular swamp of desire.
