[CRITICAL] A BIGGER SPLASH

Luca Guadagnino plunges into The pool of Jacques Deray and realizes A BIGGER SPLASH, a remake ambitious that the announcement is for the less exhilarating as the legendary film of 1969 still retains all of its beautiful today. But Luca Guadagnino takes beautiful distances with the original work and offers a genuine reinterpretation. Exit the blue drama, it doesn’t cover the basic scenario of the armature and here we are thrown into a closed psychological abundant subjects and certain originality. A BIGGER SPLASH shook the foundations of the genre, transpose its subject and modernize radically the will of the characters. Tilda Switon, Matthias Shoenaerts, Ralph Fiennes and Dakota Johnson : to form the new quartet ardent the director went to look for actors to universe far away. It is curious, A BIGGER SPLASH is definitely a new movie, for the best… but also for the worse. And this is not because they have wanted to mix and match the plot of the original which is heaps more praise on the (brilliant) sobriety. Digressions thematic incurred, narration, convoluted and writing of the characters short, A BIGGER SPLASH is a narrative that is disjointed. Despite some nice flashes, the different layers of the film do not bind them if it is so very fake. The director deals with every aspect of his film independently of each other and leaves an impression of stack of empty boxes. A BIGGER SPLASH has a structure that is brilliant and carefully thought out, but missing the essential : the organic matter.

Marianne Lane is a rock star recovering from surgery after a vocal cord surgery, she is on holiday with Paul for his companion. Their privacy and quiet is shattered by the arrival of Harry, her former lover and producer with whom she has looked after several years ago a tempestuous relationship, and his daughter Penelope. Their cohabitation seasonal will reveal the true nature of their relationship.

He blows a nice wind of feminism on the film by Luca Guadagnino , which criminalizes dice in the opening scene of its new Marianne in a position of almost militant. The singer of rock platinum across the whole phallic juts out over the stage from one stage to the cheering crowd,“She’s the legend of the century” . The delicate bourgeois Jacques Deray has swapped her sleek blow-dry against the similarity confusing to David Bowie a cougar androgynous. Marianne has the stronger sex and hot under the skirt, she is free, her manners are unrestrained, and it dominates the world around him (going right at the restaurant, celebrity above the law, the desires of all men…). It flows from quiet days with Paul, fifteen years younger, who he dedicates an admiration without reserve, and devoted entirely, to the gratifying of his exploits to a lover steamy and attention of personal assistant. Marianne seems to be all-powerful. For all that, Guadagnino did not hesitate to grant him a trait eminently subversive in choosing to take from him the voice. Robbed of his member, Tilda Swinton leaves the time of a stopover in Italy, the front of the stage to the men, and a young Penelope post-teenage nympho fingering imperturbably around the circumference of the crotch.

Luca Guadagnino orchestra its tension in a scene very supported on the corporeal nature. The foursome of love has taken form, the discord insidious, which comes between the characters is palpable. It reads in the body that concentrate and looks shifty. But in A BIGGER SPLASH , Luca Guadagnino focuses in the first place, to dissect the desire (very narcissistic) that binds them together. Just as he did in l’amore, Luca Guadagnino filming body raunchy and the sexual enjoyment in an ambience oozing. It is hot, the clothes are wet, it smells like sweat, no one can resist. The director is not afraid to shoot the nudity in the light of the day as a pledge of truth. He introduces us to the couple, Marianne and Paul in an opening in the jump-cut very raw : naked on a sun lounger they are lazy, dive into the pool translucent and hug. The skins slide one on the other, the ripples move, the breaths are raucous and languages intermingle in the bouches offered without restraint. He wants us to burn, but it does not. The scene, as all the following, has nothing erotic. As a masturbation two, the body don’t mix that in pure materials libidineuses. It lacks something, a substance, a feeling, a bond between the characters that deprives considerably these scenes of sexual intercourse and beauty of their necessary intensity. The orgasms of Marianne is troubled, but they never seem to be a cry of love. While in the Pool, we shivered at the caress of a branch on the back of Romy Schneider, you sigh here in front of a cunnilingus little attractive in which Paul honors Marianne ; and we think of the boredom of the LOVE of Gaspard Noé. The only émoustillement that the film could offer us, and not least, it is the magnetism power of Matthias Shoenaerts whose natural quality owes nothing to the director.

“Too much try to compose his characters like pieces of a puzzle story, they are stagnant at the state of skeleton disowned their emotional sphere. Story sensual as we like we used to do is a riot without interest.”

This is the starting point of the handicap of the film. One never believes the couple, Paul and Marianne, they are poorly suited. Tilda Swinton is the opposite of sensuality, in large perch bony and angular, and they can at no time have “envy” it. Same phenomenon with Dakota Johnson totally insignificant in spite of his wet bathing suit and his forms yet much more curved… It is not the mistake of casting to which one believes at first, but a fundamental lack of substrate, psychological and emotional registers from the writing. The characters seem to find their limits in the attributes very close and a report mode fixed that their range of Guadagnino. Confined to physical postures, unchanging they have to only attribute to the function to which the director was stationed. Thus, the Marianne so emblematic of the opening moves quickly into a character distant and inconsistent. His infirmity great that it was thought to be a possibility of brilliance and transcendence, there is, in fact, that its only characteristic. And this applies to almost all of the characters.

Overall Luca Guadagnino seems to build his film in a mere mechanical and forgets to “fill” its protagonists, which definitely isolated from each other, and annihilates any possibility of heat. For the modeler it uses the technique more than matter. Sequences in flashback come we learn about their psychology and the genesis of the links between them (and again, not all). But paradoxically this process is not the stuff of little, it the sclerosis, and of the present state of these characters, we do not know much if this is their desire to kiss each other. Only Harry manages to get his pin of the game, he carries the film from start to finish. Ralph Fiennes book, actually a nice feat, but also the quality of his improvisations exalted and his posturing Roberto Fellinienne, he is the only character whose stakes in the present are clearly defined and reserve a evolution.

Too many want to call his characters like pieces of a puzzle story, they are stagnant at the state of skeleton disowned their emotional sphere. Story sensual as we like we used to do is a riot without interest. Moreover, this intertwining of the past in the present is derogatory to the film in a measure even more important, since in a counter job, it will break up the tension of the plot. We are regularly raised out of the closed door meant we oppress to go and look elsewhere. We breathe, and the vise (which one feels all the same, the contours) may not be fundamentally not tighten in a asphyxia that would be necessary. Instead of strengthening his intention, the director, the crumbly, and the action is atrophy, of the lengths set in and the hopelessness we earn…

But A BIGGER SPLASH also has great success, Luca Guadagnino plunges his scenario in a game sounds dissonant. The film is literally a “great leap” in the musical world of the Rolling Stones who sanctifies the era of memories. The music is the link past lovers terrible Marianne and Harry and the intrusion permanent of these notes in this silent and Paul laid the first stone in the edifice of the rivalry between the two men. The dialectic of the sounds is indeed a dialectic of time. The past confronts the present, and Luca Gadagnino who has built his story on this frame falls on its feet. The whispers of Marianne oppose drunkenness verveuse Harry. Its quiet silent today kills their passion for music yesterday. Luca Guadagnino gives us a scene of karaoke to state of grace between the two former lovers seals, inexorably, to their separation sound : while Harry sets the bar of its timbre of tenor, Marianne replica-whispering on the mic, and then Paul enters the room, she made him a sign to come, not hesitating to give him his place in the duo consumed. The scene is superb.

A BIGGER SPLASH is another “dive”, that in Italy is the birthplace of the director and, more particularly, on the island of Pantelleria where the action takes place. Luca Guadagnino filming with eloquence, his sky blue opaque and picturesque scenery, the nature of which is arid and rocky and very Rosselliniene makes us think of Stromboli in 1950. As the ascent ofIngrid Bergman on a volcano evil, the arrival at the summit of a rocky path to the tour of Paul and Penelope swung the fate of the characters. The volcano inside of buried desires and instincts contained in the burst and pushes its characters to all transgressions up to the more fatal. The earth island Guadagnino is also the “terra di dio” by Roberto Rossellini , for whom the sky omniscient and réprobateur will be the only witness of the tragedy that would befall the quartet. A beautiful plan (of a god is subjective) in the pull back saw the sky will leave the pool disastrous for the immerse yourself in the immense geographic.

“Luca Guadagnino had desires for A BIGGER SPLASH, but he forgets the essential thing : the meeting with his characters.”

The Italian cinema of the years 50 this is a Italy news. The director distills in his scenes, the gaze he casts on the people on the island, it shows the friendliness but also the xenophobia, the lack of or the childishness. He even goes so far as to incorporate into his film, a drama geopolitical contemporary which deserves our attention, but unfortunately is still in the background. The Island where to place his story is a shore on which to dock the boats of illegal migrants. These foreign men which abound on the island cannot be of the same quality as the inhabitants or that the rich tourists with pale skin. You see sometimes hidden in the mountain, sometimes imprisoned or designated as the guilty ideal of all crimes. A BIGGER SPLASH this would finally be the “big diving” of migrants who, like the hero of the story looking for a new start and the possibility of a better life.

Luca Guadagnino had desires for A BIGGER SPLASH , and although it is brilliantly attached to the building and to enrich a form worked, he forgot the essential, the encounter with his characters. But strangely as if he had himself feared that his story lacks consistency, he tried to throw in other dimensions, more societal, political and movie-goers in the early stages insufficient. The contents of the film and control of a scenario, pre-existing seem to have been a brake on its ability to capture most of his work without the risk of scatter to feign wealth. Luca Guadagnino has not been able to channel his writing, and if we often think that the cast does not work, it is only the actors who are seen to remove any possibility of a performer. With A BIGGER SPLASCH Luca Guadagnino frustrates us and we lose as it appears to have been during the process of its creation.

Sarah Benzazon

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