A host of influences circle Luca Guadagnino's hugely attractive, frustratingly evasive follow-up to his epic I Am Love.
The film is derived from Jacques Deray's 1969 drama La Piscine – featuring Alain Delon and Romy Schneider as a couple squabbling on the Côte d'Azur – and named for a David Hockney painting, but it also reaches back to those lovely, impenetrable Michelangelo Antonioni puzzlers of the early 1960s. The frequent references to the Rolling Stones suggest comparisons with the decadent photographs that documented the recording of Exile on Main Street. But is this fecund cultural recycling to any worthwhile end?
We begin with a delicious shot of Marianne (Tilda Swinton), an ill-defined rock star, strutting before a swelling crowd at a festival. Are we allowed one more reference? She loses her voice and – like the similarly dumbstruck Liv Ullmann in Persona – retires to an island for recuperation.
Marianne and boyfriend Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts), a photographer, are enjoying their time on Pantelleria when an old chum Harry Hawkes arrives to disrupt the furniture. Played with unhinged enthusiasm by Ralph Fiennes, Hawkes – Marianne's former producer – has brought with him Penelope, the daughter (Dakota Johnson) to whom he has only recently been introduced.
Unthinking immersion is invited and rewarded. Guadagnino's playful camera has great fun dragging characters into the corner of the frame and slipping into point-of-view shots. Much use is made of Swinton's mirror shades, behind which the actor shimmers like a chilled alien. Injecting a nervous laugh into every enthusiastic syllable, Fiennes creates an infuriating, charismatic, persuasive monster of Harry. His dad dance to The Stones' Emotional Rescue has already gained mythical status.
For all that, A Bigger Splash suffers from a failure to flesh out any other character. Paul is a bore. Marianne is a cipher. Penelope is one of two highly dubious incarnations of the archetypal teenage temptress. Guadagnino's film is gorgeously presented, but it's raw in the middle.
