Movie Review: A Bigger Splash (English/Italian)

A Bigger Splash

What can make a bigger splash than murder? But at the start of it all, A Bigger Splash, directed by Luca Guadagnino and loosely based on the 1969 French-Italian film La Piscine, treads in shallow waters, taking its own sweet time to reach the explosive finale. All the time taunting us, the audience, with gorgeous Italian vistas and simmering sexual tension that's less a love triangle and more a love quadrilateral, with the plot kicking off when Harry Hawkes and his daughter Penelope gate-crash famous rock star and former flame Marianne Lane's idyllic island vacation with her current photographer boyfriend Paul De Smedt, who, in a strange turn of events, was introduced to her by Harry himself.

At first it's all a fun-filled get-together, the obvious awkwardness notwithstanding, not to mention a breach of their sequestered calm and quietude, until it isn't and Marianne, recovering from a vocal surgery, realises she still harbours feelings for Harry, as a new-found attraction blossoms between Paul and Penelope. It's at this juncture the story's erotic languor morphs into something psychologically sinister, and Harry's sexual machinations made apparent (Did Agatha Christie or Ruth Rendell's stories come to my mind? You bet it did!), as director Guadagnino subtly sets aside the sensuous carnal delights for a far more pressing political commentary on the ongoing European refugee crisis. It's a clever curveball that makes A Bigger Splash an electric drama, armed with a twist you wouldn't have otherwise seen coming.