Clash on a Hot Italian Roof: A BIGGER SPLASH

A Bigger Splash is a sensual melodrama with sun-baked Italian noir intentions that don’t fully reveal themselves until late in the film. Until then it spends a good long time watching its characters behave, collecting them in a contained space and tracking their interactions, subtle shifts in demeanor, taking and giving offense, drawn to and repulsed by each other. There’s an androgynous rock goddess (Tilda Swinton) recovering from vocal chord surgery staying at an isolated villa on a small Italian island with her handsome documentarian boyfriend (Matthias Schoenaerts). They’re comfortable and quiet, enjoying reading and sunning, mostly nude. So it’s a rude awakening to change their routine – and cover up a bit – when they have unexpected guests in the form of the rocker’s ex, a preening music producer (Ralph Fiennes) and his 22-year-old daughter (Dakota Johnson), who he only recently learned existed. They come to overshadow their vacation, quite literally blotting out the sun with their arrival as their descending plane casts its silhouette on a sunny beach.

Director Luca Guadagnino, whose 2009 feature I Am Love was an even more sumptuous melodrama starring Swinton, sets about creating a lush European character piece under which can simmer an undercurrent of eroticism and danger. The four people cooped up in an island getaway have intertwining pasts – it was Fiennes who first introduced Schoenaerts to Swinton, a couple who have now been together for many years, weathering storms that weigh with slowly revealed heaviness upon their relationship – and yet often try to act like they don’t. On one level it’s a movie about languorous rock and rollers at rest, stretching out poolside, cooking wonderful meals, reading interesting literature, spinning great records. They engage in passionate behavior, dancing, swimming, and eating amongst skin, sun, lapping waves, and fragrant fauna. What’s better than a late night karaoke session at a local street festival or an impromptu dance party? And yet what are these people really up to? It’s not always clear. There’s a lot of tension here, sexual – they’re four beautiful people in close quarters, after all – and otherwise.

It’s a movie about looking, we at them and they at each other. David Kajganich’s screenplay, based on a 1969 Alain Delon film called La Piscine, offers plenty of excuses to bring characters together, trapping them in encounters tracing shifts and jabs in relationships, often communicated nonverbally in a glance held in a shot/reverse shot, or a showy camera swivel, or a reflection off a pair of glasses. Guadagnino deploys splendid Yorick Le Saux camerawork in ways that show off its fluid dexterity, pushing in and swinging around, or cut into in quick flashes of distemper. It’s a movie that rests on its characters making eyes at one another – lovers expressing empathy or disgust, a preening braggart making it all about him, or a quiet girl sitting alone at a remove, testing the waters without making the content of her thoughts clear. It tracks silent transmissions of charged implications, tracing fault lines to an inevitable crack-up. The danger of something bad happening is always present, though its exact cause or source is kept tingling just out of reach. Deft flashbacks help reveal tangled emotions long past, which help contextualize the confusion of the present.

Four terrific performances animate what could easily be a frustratingly vague haze. Because the actors are comfortably rooted in their characters’ skins – the better to pull off an easy, breezy, equal-opportunity nudity from all involved at one point or another – it’s worth investing in their circumstances and puzzling out their motivations. Fiennes takes center stage as a man who can’t stop talking, pick pick picking at characters’ insecurities in ways that are equally unaware and yet too targeted to be totally dismissed as accident. This is in contrast to Swinton, whose recovering rocker is under medical orders to remain silent, her only dialogue spoken sparingly in a pained whisper. Schoenaerts has a solid masculine sensitivity about him, clearly in love, a doting caretaker totally annoyed by their unexpected guests, and yet retains corners of mystery about his emotional place. Lastly, Johnson is what? She’s totally unknowable up to the end, at once powerless and holding all the cards, an open book and a continually unfolding mystery. Is she a schemer or merely aloof, a seductress or a guileless id? As we learn just what these characters mean and mean to each other, the conflict at a low-boil is clearly ready to boil over.

When it reaches its deliriously unsettled conclusion, the tantalizing surface composure works to make it very cold, rejecting conventional satisfying conclusions or answers. What could be over-the-top is instead underplayed with dark comedy and cold laughs. (Listen to what a police chief barks over the phone about the morgue freezer and tell me it’s not going for deliberate gallows humor.) It is a bit deflating to turn such a hothouse of melodrama into a bitterly ironic noir in its final moments. But Guadagnino plays by the rules he set up, brining the characters in inevitable conflict and springing surprising developments with a certain merciless logic. Sure, it would be nice to cavort in the sun with gorgeous half-undressed people, but the fun has to end sometime, and in this case the real world encroaches through petty jealousies and sharp pangs of regret. What’s the worth of a passionate Dionysian lifestyle if it’s so fragile people who know just the right exploitable cracks in the façade can bring it to the brink of ruin?

Head in the CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA

Clouds of Sils Maria, the latest from French writer-director Olivier Assayas, is a beautifully textured film of austere natural beauty and complicated interpersonal relationships. Assayas films, even the bad ones, are closely attuned to the effect physical spaces have on character’s interior lives. It’s never more literal than the contested estate in Summer Hours, a space laden with memories for a family in mourning. But there are also the anonymous techie nightmare locales in Demonlover, analogue procedurals in Carlos, vintage French cinema echoes in Irma Vep, semi-autobiographical activist circles in Something in the Air, and more. His characters don’t merely play out their stories. They inhabit a space, creating a richly textured stage for their dramas.

His new film takes place in Sils Maria, a small town in the Alps where, from the right scenic view, you can see the clouds sit majestically below the surrounding peaks. They come rolling in over the landscape, with the snowy mountaintops above, a green valley below. A shift in perspective can change an overcast day to one where the clouds snake low elegantly across the horizon. The story that takes place there carries inescapable comparison to Ingmar Bergman, spending the majority of its time with two women at a small house in the Swiss countryside, dealing with their personas and how they confront the existential questions of their lives. The wide-open spaces contrast with the cramped quarters as the women find themselves stuck together while heavy ideas threaten to weigh them down.

But where Bergman finds spiritual concerns at the center of being, Assayas here deals with art. They’re not debating the existence of God. They’re wrestling with textual analysis, competing interpretations of a script that just might define their relationship, their careers, maybe even their lives. This a gripping psychological dynamic wrapped around an invigorating academic exercise. The women are a middle-aged actress (Juliette Binoche) and her younger assistant (Kristen Stewart), who are staying in the isolated town while prepping for a new project. It’s a play about an aging businesswoman and her relationship with her young assistant. The actress made her debut in this play two decades earlier, in the role of the assistant. Now the playwright has died and she agrees to be in a new staging, taking on the other role.

The connection between past and present, life and art, is made clear, then underlined. It’s a moment of professional crisis for the actress, as Binoche subtly lets showbiz fears and artistic frustration mingle with a determination to do right by the play that gave her a start. She has memories of how old the other actress appeared to her back then, and now can hardly believe that she’s that age herself. It certainly doesn’t help her state to be staying in the house of the dead man, running lines with her assistant, who Stewart plays with a congenial disaffectedness sliding into unexpected passions. Their employer/assistant relationship drifts closer to a friendship, mirroring the similar dynamic in the play, which there ended in tragedy. Assayas will often start scenes without cluing us into whether or not we’re hearing lines or what these characters actually are. In this way, the play blends with life, as a fluid exploration of what life brings to art and vice versa.

Lightheaded in the altitude, they engage in long discussions of the play, about the text as an object, while the clouds roll through a pale blue sky. There’s a sense that they’re helping each other look into the haze and pull out an interpretation. The older woman can’t stop worrying that her character is thinly drawn and pathetic. The younger woman sees the same character as containing hidden depths. They’re both right, and wrong. There’s a terrifically unsettling sequence with footage of a winding road playing over images of Stewart, a woozy abstract symbol of the film’s hazy doublings. Because the play isn’t real in our world, and because we only glimpse it through their dialogues, these scenes play out like going to a great class without having done the reading. It’s fascinating, and also easy to get a little lost.

But this only adds to the mystery and gravity of this drama, in which every character is a reflection of the actress’s past – an old co-star (Hanns Zischler), the playwrights’ widow (Angela Winkler) – or a future she can’t quite imagine herself fitting in. We meet a wild young Hollywood actress (Chloe Grace Moretz), introduced through glimpses in YouTube videos and a scene from her franchise picture, then in scenes of icy recognition of the way the world restricts starlets’ choices. There’s an undertow of Hollywood commentary, reflected even in the careers of the three actresses. But in a film Yorick Le Saux shoots with cool calm, filled with palatial landscapes – rolling mountainsides, lush green hills, still waters – and lush classical music, Assayas locates a meditative edge to what could’ve easily been All About Eve or Birdman territory. This isn’t a movie about a desperate artist trying to prove her relevance, or fending off hungrier youth. It’s merely one trembling emotional current running beneath its iced-over surfaces.

There’s an absorbing charge to the leads’ relationship, an interdependence and emotional vulnerability as their isolation forces them to confront core questions about how they see the world and where they’re headed in life. In the process, Binoche and Stewart deliver a wonderful acting duet, playing off each other in ways that break down intermingling professional and personal angst with the feeling of a complicated, lived-in, in some ways unknowable, relationship. It’s a film about fighting insecurities and how unmerciful the world can be in leaving behind those who succumb to theirs. And yet together they make it a warm, sometimes funny, often casually incisive character study about two people who fear they’ve lost sight of who they want to be, and lean on each other while trying to move in the right direction, or at least change their perspective to see something wonderful.

Bored to Death: ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

Living a life as long as the average human lifespan can get pretty boring. Days can pass slowly, tasks growing monotonous. Maybe depression sets in. The great George Sanders, the actor who gave us, among many fine performances, All About Eve’s droll theater critic Addison DeWitt, committed suicide at the age of 65, his note reading, in part: “I am leaving because I am bored.” It’s a tragedy, to be sure, and one that the pale and reclusive Adam (Tom Hiddleston) is contemplating. He simply feels he’s been alive for so very long, finding his days – no, his years – passing in a blur of moping around his dilapidated and cluttered house in an abandoned corner of Detroit. Occasionally he rouses himself to noodle with his beloved antique instruments and archaic technologies, sometimes composing a song. He orders a custom-made bullet to be made out of dense wood and thinks he might shoot into his heart for real this time. You see, he’s a vampire, and the endless centuries have grown dull. You think living 80, 90 years seems daunting? Try 800, 900 years, or longer.

This is the world of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, a vampire movie that thrums to its own frequency, vibrating on a chill and melancholic mood. It’s not a horror movie, or rather, not exactly a horror movie. It’s more a come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-vampirism party, a slow and consuming hangout movie with ghoulish and existential underpinnings. It doesn’t move quickly so as not to break the spell. Adam is quiet, still, contemplative. His wife, Eve (Tilda Swinton), leaves her home in Tangiers to come for a visit, blaming all the time spent with Romantic poets a couple centuries ago for her husband’s current funk. They move on a different time-scale than ours, able to big-picture our mortal world, sighing at our stasis, our cyclical crises. They watch humans making a mess of the world from the helplessness of the shadows. They’re tired of us. Says he to she, “They’re still fighting over Darwin. Still.”

The vampires of Jarmusch’s imagination here are neither suave bloodsuckers nor skulking monsters and they certainly aren’t out stalking human prey. No, they sit at home, sleep all day and sulk all night. They’re cultured, have read all the great books, seen all the great art, heard all the great songs. They have all the time in the world to appreciate their surroundings, but are tired of doing it and seeing human failings endlessly repeated. When hungry, they just go the blood bank and bribe their usual accomplice (Jeffrey Wright) for the bags of liquid life they need to sustain themselves, sipping small amounts for nourishment and what seems like a bit of a high. The camera pushes forwards as they tip their heads back, eyes ecstatic, mouth agape in dopey fangs-baring grins.

The vampires rarely go out, at most driving down dark, empty streets. Adam has something like a human buddy, a young man (Anton Yelchin) who stops by with vintage music equipment for sale and acts as a middleman between the secret vampire and Detroit’s underground music scene. He and the blood doctor are the film’s only connection to the human world. Jarmusch spends the runtime immersed in the day-to-day drudgery of these vampires, intensely observing the loneliness and alienation of the marginalized. What’s more marginal, fringe, than being literally unable to step into the daylight? They are in the world without being of the world. There’s an authentic ice-cold elitism in their attitudes, superiority and isolation accumulated over the centuries.

Hiddleston and Swinton are convincingly vampiric with flowing hair and dark eyes in ghostly white faces accentuating their cheekbones. When they go out at night, they wear sunglasses. They’re cool. They move deliberately and with grace, totally comfortable with their bodies and with each other, romantically entangled for what seems like hundreds upon hundreds of years. Of course, after centuries of practice, you would be awfully comfortable, too. These are enigmatic performances, drawing focus in any given frame with nothing more than their presences. Confident performers, they use stillness and quiet to great effect, engendering great curiosity with a strong sense of history and sadness. The vampires have had time to cultivate both. They have seen and experienced so much and yet only have each other to share it with.

A few others of their kind drift into the picture. One is Christopher Marlowe (John Hurt). Yes, that Marlowe. He’s just a little bitter that Shakespeare took credit for his plays on the small technicality that everyone thought Marlowe was dead. Oh, well. A secret is a secret. Another guest is Eve’s adopted sister (Mia Wasikowska). They haven’t seen her in 87 years. She’s clearly a younger vampire, relatively speaking. Inhabiting the body of a blonde party girl, she embraces entirely unselfconsciously her status as a flighty, impulsive, adorably energetic disruption and danger to her relatives’ stasis. She crinkles her nose in an ingratiatingly cute way, but she’s as needy as she is deadly. “You know how it is with family,” Eve deadpans. The story, such as it is, concerns the way these characters interact with each other and with the world of the humans, but it’s mostly an intoxicating mood piece and character study.

The film’s characters are written with bone-dry wit of a familiar Jarmusch style, speaking leisurely and precisely in diction that’s bookish, moody, and in keeping with deliberately paced actions, cinematographer Yorick Le Saux’s brooding slowly or unmoving shots, and the sound design’s extended patches of silence mixed with the low throb of a score. It coheres as a picture of a long, slow, philosophical existence. The vampires are often condescending, secure in the knowledge that they’ve seen so much and understand the world from a large first-hand sample size of history that the humans around them have no hope of catching up. They stick together because only another vampire can understand the particular, peculiar, entrancing boredom of immortality.