The Dead Body In The Pool In The Beautiful Rented Villa

A Bigger Splash (2015) direted by Luca Gaudigno is like his superior I Am Love an exploration of the lives of people with too much time on their hands.  Splash is much, much slighter, a mere improvisation with a premise of stunning predictability.  

Of course, that is probably immaterial to Mr. Guadigno.  We Americans preach narrative economy above all, and drive headlong from story point to story point.  Texture is just for cinematographers or post-production sound mixers.  But like most European filmmakers, Mr. Guadigno is not afraid to slow down and let the rhythms of life flow by, which makes this film about 20-25 minutes longer than it would be under an American film director.

And then you would have lost one of the strangest and most interesting grace notes of the film.  I hope it's not too much of a spoiler to learn that one of the four principal characters pictured above dies in a pool before the film is over.  In an American picture, we would barrel ahead to the interrogations, the unanswered questions, the betrayals, etc., etc.  But we are in Italy, and this is a rented house.  And the film takes its time to show just how unpleasant and uncomfortable it would be to have someone die in the pool of your beautiful rented villa in Italy.  The uniformed policemen come and put up some very tatty crime scene tape.  Then the pool must be emptied, and that takes time.  A lot of time.  Time enough that one can go down to the police station and back and it's still not quite done and the body has still not been extricated.  The whole matter is just ugly and nasty and even if the dead person in the pool wasn't close to you, it still would throw an awful shadow over your vacation, as if someone had thrown sewage into the wine barrels.

I don't think many American filmmakers would have stopped to note that.  They want to focus on who and how and how that makes the protagonists feel, but that approach would have missed the comical upbeat at the end of the movie, in which the police chief insists on getting an autograph from vacationing rock star Tilda Swinton in the middle of an absolute downpour.  Does that explain anything?  No, but it helps make A Bigger Splash just a bit more special than it would have been.

Shakespeare without poetry

No sense in being coy about it:  I would place Ralph Fienne's adaptation of Coriolanus (2012) among the top four or five Shakespeare films which are real movie-movies, not recordings of stage productions and which require no preparation and no excuses.  (If you want to know, Welles's Othello and the Ian MacKellan Richard III are among the others Oh, and by the way, that guy Shakespeare has 869 credits in imdb as I write this.) When I sat down to watch the film, intimidated by never having read the play, I turned on the titles.  Unnecessary.  Completely unnecessary.  My guess is that Fiennes ruthlessly pruned whatever poetic flights the play has in favor of utter and complete clarity, which he achieved.

As I look through the reviews and discussion of the film, I can't claim to have observed anything much that other writers haven't.  Perhaps it was because taking in this story of power, politics and betrayal for the first time was rather overwhelming.  It will certainly re-pay re-viewing.

Obviously, choosing cinematographer Barry Ackroyd of Hurt Locker fame was central to the conceit, which places the story in a vaguely Eastern European war zone.  Fiennes also did something so many stage-experienced directors fail to do, which is cast visually distinctive actors in the supporting roles so as to help the viewer keep track of who's who.  There was some criticism of the use of cable news talking heads, but to me they are a perfect analogy to the play's choral characters.

But the film's raison d'etre is the performance of Vanessa Redgrave, playing an exemplar of that strange species, the mother of a Roman General.  I would argue that this is her best work on film.  She conveys a steely strength which is not so much cruel as it is heedless of ordinary considerations of human relationships, because the Roman noble household is all about power, the getting and maintenance thereof.  If Coriolanus doesn't make it into the time capsules on its own merits, it will surely be represented as a landmark in Redgrave's great career.

And, hey, what a year Jessica Chastain (Tree of Life, Take Shelter, The Help), has had!