4/5
There’s an interview with Bono of U2 in which he’s faced with a question about the lasting impact of losing his mother at the age of fourteen. He responds by suggesting that any man who needs to go out on stage and take in the screams of thousands of people chanting his name clearly has issues. Throughout the whole film, I wondered if A Bigger Splash had that idea as its starting point and decided to go a bit further; it wonders how much of that mania follows them off the stage, out of costume, and into their their bedrooms to boil over.
I say “starting point” because this isn’t isn’t a film about music, although music is always within reach. When we open on this film’s rock star, Tilda Swinton’s Bowie-inspired Marianne Lane, she’s probably the farthest place she could be from the stage, and for good reason – she’s recovering from a risky surgery that may leave her voiceless, and therefore one can assume career-less. What better a backdrop for recovery than a seclusion in the rocky Italian hillsides? But there wouldn’t be a movie if that vacation didn’t take a detour. Out of nowhere, Marianne and her husband Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) are firebombed by the arrival of Marriane’s former producer and lover, a flamboyant Ralph Fiennes named Harry and his daughter, Penelope (Dakota Johnson), the existence of whom he’s only recently discovered. I have known and loved people not unlike Harry — they exist as one-sheets for their own boisterousness, as if dialing it back might be seen as an admission of defeat in some off-screen cage match nobody asked to be a part of.
It’s revealed in flashback not only that Harry and Marriane were once lovers but also that Harry gave Paul his blessing to pursue Marriane after their six-year marriage had dissolved. It seems at first like a gesture that only brought them closer, but as is almost always the case, emotions linger, and we see how the years have slowly warped that respect into a kind of muted resentment.
The moment everybody convenes at the airport, we know a fuse has been lit, and we’re pretty sure they know it too. The pleasure of the movie is relishing in the lengths people will go to keep themselves from mentioning the elephant in the room. We know it’s all going to come out eventually — that’s the nature of these things — but it’s what keeps us watching. It’s also what keeps the film firmly rooted in reality; the ways in which these characters live in denial of their feelings almost speak more than the feelings themselves, and isn’t that how it usually works?
All of this might make the movie seem like a dour affair. Far from it. It’s also incredibly funny, not to mention sexy. The sex between characters is presented not so much as as titillation but rather as the language of their desperation, something that’s only bolstered by the laughs in between. For every scene with Ralph Fiennes having a ball at everyone’s expense, there’s another with a sandy-voiced Tilda Swinton wordlessly begging for the whole trip to be over.
Much will be made of this film’s performances, especially those of Fiennes and Swinton, but I’d like to fly the flag for Matthias Schoenaerts as having the most surprising turn. Paul is a character with so much to say and yet so few opportunities to speak up, and Schoenaerts lends a deeply rooted complexity to his soft-spoken nature. There is an active sense of front to his calm, as if the chaos around him has turned his sanity into a responsibility rather than a clarity.
I picture some people being disappointed by the film’s choice to push the music itself into the background. I persuade you to move beyond that and embrace the movie for what it’s serving you. Have we not become numb to fictional accounts of rock ’n roll? We have Almost Famous, we have Velvet Goldmine. This film isn’t about the glamour of rock ’n roll as much as it is the unspoken, pressurized emotions that can become the rhythm section of our lives.
Spencer Moleda is a freelance writer, script supervisor, and motion picture researcher residing in Los Angeles, California. His experience ranges from reviewing movies to providing creative guidance to fledgling film projects. You can reach him at: [email protected]
Spencer Moleda is a freelance writer, script supervisor, and motion picture researcher residing in Los Angeles, California. His experience ranges from reviewing movies to providing creative guidance to fledgling film projects. You can reach him at: [email protected]