Reseñas de la crítica

I like how the film makes Tilda Swinton's famous rock star more vulnerable by making her more remote and largely mute, and the fact that she is actually the least mysterious persona in the film. Perhaps against my better judgment, I am swept up in the incessant attack of Guadagnino's camera, which strikes every room and character from as many angles as possible, through zooms, abrupt dollies, and point-of-view shots.

La Piscine should have been directed by Chabrol. Its blackly comic situation is dissipated by Deray's inability to pace, his persnickety framing, and his general discomfort with the script—he is happier with the terse testosterone of crime narratives like Borsalino and Flic Story. This is material that needs to be grabbed by the hair and run with, as Guadagnino does and then some. Nevertheless, partly because of Carrière's sly plotting, La Piscine is by far the more interesting of the two films.

Guadagnino usurps traditional narrative storytelling for jarring stylistic decisions, like sudden accusatory close-ups and ponderous long takes. The agitation caused by Harry's tornado-like personality and motivations further inspires a sense of collective disruption. That theme ultimately comes to fruition in an unsatisfyingly familiar finale, but by then the film has already achieved an invisible menace that has been consistently filtered through passive-aggression and desire.

Guadagnino concentrates on exploring the range of colors to be found in romantic tension, anxiety and bliss. He's especially attuned to the place where sensual and platonic love intersect—or must part ways. The picture is at times loose and wayward, as if it has lost its way a bit on a winding rocky path, and it ends on an uncertain note that may not be fully satisfying. But its flaws are blurred by its vibrating, sensual energy.

All this wanton behavior sparks such giddy pleasure that the film's eventual tonal shift feels especially deflating. Guadagnino inserts a plot thread indicting Europe's response to the migrant crisis, shoehorning an issue of utmost gravity into a pulpy sex thriller. Not even this flamboyant project, however satisfying in its excesses otherwise, can accommodate the inept civics lesson.

In the slick, ludicrous, semi-entertaining A Bigger Splash, Tilda Swinton plays Marianne, a towering rock star who is recuperating from throat surgery on the volcanic island of Pantelleria in the straits of Sicily with her six-year lover Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts), a documentary filmmaker and recovering suicidal alcoholic. For an art-house sun-and-skin fantasy like this one, that throat-surgery bit—which Swinton came up with—is a masterstroke, though not for the intended reasons...

The world that Mr. Guadagnino creates is at once seductive and aspirational, and another reminder that movies have always excelled at stoking consumer desires. Much like Nancy Meyers ("The Intern"), Mr. Guadagnino excels at creating lifestyle pornography of an especially rarefied kind, although in classic European style, he gilds the pleasure with some political guilt.

What intrigues, if in a lurid sort of way, is the film's fudging of projected viewer desires with its characters': The filmmakers stake a position too close to these excesses to finger-wag anybody on either side of the camera, which zooms, whip-pans, rack-focuses, and settles with a lusty, manic intentionality to match the scatterbrained, anything-goes mentality of the story's gilded seaside milieu.

It's no surprise A Bigger Splash eventually takes a murderous turn, though it comes freighted with a half-baked bit of class commentary involving the island's migrant population, who feature in several scenes as ignoble and/or sinister background extras. Guadagnino treats them with the kind of condescension common to well-intentioned artists with points to make about the haves and the have-nots.

A Bigger Splash, Luca Guadagnino's new entertainment set on the island of Pantelleria off the coast of Sicily, would be only a somewhat stale and unconvincing product were it not for its treatment of the European refugee crisis, which makes the film lurch from the merely vulgar into the grotesque.

The silly pretensions that have made Guadagnino such a bête noire to Italian critics are substantially eclipsed by the generally diverting spectacle of four excellent actors letting it all hang out in the service of a torrid, high-class soap.

Fiennes is bracingly brash and obnoxious in this boisterous drama of middle-aged romantic gamesmanship and self-mythologizing. It's about as subtle in seeking effects as I Am Love but entertaining in its own right.