A bigger splash

We’ve all been there, no? You’re having a lovely relaxing holiday, well into your groove, when an old mate turns up – happens to be passing through the area, you know – and then asks to kip on the sofa for ‘a couple’ of nights.

That’s exactly what happens in A Bigger Splash, a film into whose torpid summer we plunge from the opening minutes. Tilda Swinton is rock star Marianne Lane, recovering in retreat on the Sicilian island of Pantelleria after a throat operation. She can’t speak for the whole summer, which is fine, as she’s mainly having sex with her beefy younger lover, a documentary maker played by Euro-hunk Matthias Schoenaerts.

However, their holiday idyll is rudely interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Harry, a rock-music producer and former boyfriend of Marianne played by Ralph Fiennes, who relishes his own outlandish performance and lends it a pungent blend of infectious and irritating. A live wire of bluster and self-mythology, Harry has in tow a pretty young daughter he’s just discovered is his (Dakota Johnson), and their presence triggers a fizz of unpredictable chemistry around the swimming pool.

Director Luca Guadagnino, who made the gorgeous Milanese family melodrama I Am Love, also starring Swinton, brings a very casual sensuality and style to the strip-varnished wooden table. Everyone’s handsome and cool, dressed in Dior and Raf Simons, yet wearing their media fashionability and easy urbanity lightly in these charming rustic surrounds, seemingly at ease with the locals and their bars and out-of-the-way restaurants.

Guadagnino skewers that sense of metropolitan privilege very subtly, and from within. The wealthy bohemians’ transitory state is mirrored by the undercurrent of threat provided by the steady arrival on the island of a different sort of summer migrant: a stream of African refugees, some held in internment camps, some hiding in the scrubby hills, desperately clinging to life.

When the wine, sun and sexual tensions at the villa get too much, the police and local islanders become involved, and summer turns distinctly chilly.

A Bigger Splash builds its mysteries around the pool and hangs it oh-so-stylishly on two grand performances from Swinton and Fiennes. The former underplays it with whispers and sheer charisma (making Marianne mute was her idea, the film-maker tells me, and it works a treat, despite having nearly sent the scriptwriter into a blind panic); the latter has a ball in his own string pants and open shirt, at one memorable point rocking out to the Rolling Stones’ 1980 hit Emotional Rescue – who knew, but Ralph Fiennes has got the moves like Jagger.

I loved A Bigger Splash. It’s funny, seductive and dangerously indulgent, cleverly turning into something rather more sinister than a sunbathe. Viewed here in the freezing winter, it made me want to go on holiday immediately… and definitely not tell anyone where I’ve gone.