A Bigger Splash ***½ (2015, Ralph Fiennes, Dakota Johnson, Matthias Schoenaerts, Tilda Swinton) – Movie Review

Ralph Fiennes, Dakota Johnson, Matthias Schoenaerts and Tilda Swinton have a grand time in director Luca Guadagnino’s intriguing, tantalising mystery drama puzzle. It’s both arty and full on, with the talented starry quartet up for it, and largely making it work.

It’s a shame that Swinton is gagged by having virtually no lines to speak of, but she still makes her presence felt. While on screen, Fiennes largely takes over the show. Both in style and content, the film has a confident old-style art movie feel about it, rightly so it seems, because it’s a remake of, or maybe homage to, a largely forgotten movie, Jacques Deray’s La Piscine [The Swimming Pool] (1969) with Alain Delon, Romy Schneider, Jane Birkin and Maurice Ronet.

Though the story and location are altered, it is exactly true to the spirit of the original, which Guadagnino and screen-writer David Kajganich must have adored. Just like that, it is a dark and puzzling film with flashes of wit and style, but pretentious and cold, though enlivened by the top cast.

Swinton and Schoenaerts play a famous rock star and her film-maker lover, who are holidaying on the idyllic, sun-drenched remote Italian island of Pantelleria, off Sicily, while she recovers speechless from an operation on her vocal chords.

Their idyll is disrupted by the unexpected visit of a lusty old music business friend (Ralph Fiennes) and his daughter (Dakota Johnson), creating a maelstrom of jealousy, passion, tension, seduction and danger.

It’s pretty much one of those love it or hate it jobs. The man in front of me coming out of the cinema said ‘I couldn’t wait for it to end.’ Other viewers may well warm to its quirk, edgy, dangerous charms. Fiennes gives the most exuberant, bare-cheeked of performances. Now really! What would M say?

© Derek Winnert 2016 Movie Review

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