*****

ALFRED Hitchcock famously explained the difference between suspense and surprise using the image of a bomb under a table. If the people at the table are talking and the bomb goes off before the audience have been made aware of it, that’s surprise. But if the audience see the bomb first, followed by the people talking, that’s suspense. In the two films he’s made with Tilda Swinton, I Am Love (2009) and A Bigger Splash, director Luca Guadagninio does with swimming pools what Hitchcock did with explosives, but the results are no less devastating. I Am Love gave us surprise; now comes suspense.

Ralph Fiennes’s penis has so many scenes you start to wonder whether one of the producers owed it a favour

The film opens on Marianne (Tilda Swinton), a middle-aged rock star living on an Italian island with her younger lover, Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts). She is recuperating from a throat operation that has left her temporarily unable to speak in anything above a whisper, and from which there is no guarantee of recovery, but she doesn’t seem too upset about it. Between the delicious food, the breath-taking scenery, naked sunbathing and sex in the pool with her brawny boyfriend, life is close to perfect. Even the unexpected arrival of her former producer, Harry (Ralph Fiennes), seems no more than a pleasant diversion, never mind that he’s brought his daughter, Penelope (Dakota Johnson), along for the ride.

After a magical evening at a hillside restaurant, Marianne invites the newcomers to stay at her villa, much to the irritation of the taciturn Paul. But even Paul isn’t completely resistant to Harry’s manic charm. The producer is a hyperactive motor-mouth who drinks heavily, struts around the house naked and invites extra guests without asking permission, but you can’t deny he’s the life and soul of the party. Penelope, by contrasts, is a more elusive character, reserved and watchful. She has a tattoo on her inner arm that says acta non verba and she gives the impression of always being a little bored. At first the co-habitation just about works, but it soon becomes clear that Harry has an ulterior motive for coming, and it’s not long afterwards that Penelope gets tired of lying around in the sun and starts hatching schemes of her own. The drama reaches its climax with what can only be called a ‘significant swimming-pool event’, but the story keeps going for a while afterwards, drawing out suspicions and deceptions and showing us how the characters struggle to reconstitute themselves after a life-changing experience.

 

A Bigger Splash is a sumptuous film, filled with the touristic pleasures of scenery and food. It is also lavish with the bodies of its leads, all of whom spend a great deal of time partially or entirely undressed. (Ralph Fiennes’s penis has so many scenes you start to wonder whether one of the producers owed it a favour.) But what compels attention above all is the masterful handling of suspense. Maybe the swimming pool is the bomb or maybe Harry is – the male ego itself is another plausible suspect – but you know that something is going to go off, sooner or later, and when it does there’s going to be a terrible mess. The atmosphere is sustained at an editing level through ominous close-ups and smash cuts, as if Jean-Luc Godard were directing a video for the Italian tourist board; nonetheless, it’s chiefly the result of excellent ensemble performances.

Fiennes is the obvious stand out, if only because he’s permanently cranked up to eleven, but Schoenaerts provides a quiet, steely counterpoint, and Johnson makes a virtue of her apparent ordinariness – one of the qualities that earned her the part of Anastasia Steele in Fifty Shades of Grey – to slip in and out of the action as required. In the end, though, it’s Swinton who holds the film together. Her near-mute performance forces her to occupy the screen in different ways, finding a space between the two men vying for her attention. Over time the choice of speech or silence becomes almost a test of loyalty, and we are invited to ponder which of the Mariannes we’re seeing is the real one: the coked-up rock chick risking her voice to whisper choruses in a packed karaoke bar, or the more retiring woman who sunbathes and reads and smilingly accepts the medication prepared every night by her boyfriend. It’s very much to the film’s and to Swinton’s credit that this question is not as straightforward as it sounds.

Bigger Splash is showing at HOME, the ODEON and Curzon Knutsford.