REVIEW: A Bigger Splash (2015, Dir. Luca Guadagnino)

Middle age is a tough territory to navigate. Post-piss and wind, the body starts to wind down, desires start to dwindle, loosened belts and other comforts start to beckon. For the rock stars amongst us, this bedraggling of vitality comes with an extra kicker - what happens when you've lived fast but didn't get around to dying young? Some succumb, others push through into the dreaded man-child territory and they dance in the sunset, taunting the casualties with their self-centred vigour. We celebrate them from afar. When they're in our face we we mock them.

Into this ripe, ripe territory steps Italy's ripest director, Luca Guadagnino. In amongst his latest, A Bigger Splash (a title that clearly urges comparison with its source material, Jacques Deray's 1969 film La piscine), Guadagnino throws some big personalities, Tilda Swinton, Matthias Schoenarts, Ralph Fiennes, Dior, The Rolling Stones. There is nothing subtle here.

For the first hour and a half it works like a perceptive, seductive treat. Guadagnino is a tactile director, all hot sun, bare bodies and fecundity. Sure he can go over the top (I loved his previous film, I Am Love, for that very reason) but it all serves a purpose. Here, Swinton's voice-resting rock star, tended to by her boyfriend, Shoenaerts's calming, post-rehab documentarian-on-hiatus, picks up her ex from the single runway airport near her Pantelleria villa.

He, or rather HE, a voracious, life-gorging music producer, tears through their comfortable beach-lazing lifestyle and threatens to bring the whole world down around him. I never would have seen it in him but Fiennes tears up the screen playing against type. He's insane, impulsive, carefree (but for a lingering urge to jump his ex's bones) and 100% dad-sexy, which turns out to be quite literally so since he turns up with his daughter in tow (a possibly underwritten, definitely out of her depth Dakota Johnson).

The four of them complete a rather academic love quadrangle, which tangles together the "live fast", the "settle down" and the "die", young or otherwise. Guadagnino does well to exploit it under the hot Italian sun. The bodies glisten, the sunglasses mirror and the fresh ricotta sets succulently. At its best, A Bigger Splash seeps off the screen with its heavily laden decadence.

But Guadagnino can't keep it buoyant forever. His film founders into its second act and dries up well before its startling turn (for those who haven't seen the original or the trailer). There's some interest in the metaphorical violence between our inner selves, here split out before our eyes, but the extended central sag finds the eventual confrontations feeling trite. Attempts to balance this loss of steam with a slim commentary on Europe's refugee crisis come to naught.

I can't thing of a film in recent memory that has squandered so much goodwill so energetically. The end result is a perplexing effort that will most likely be remembered for its inability to justify its own existence at the end of the party. If I were feeling more generous, I'd almost say it is as if Guadagnino wanted to use the film's deflation as a thematic tool. Unfortunately I can't be that kind.

★★★

Trailer: