A Bigger Splash

Pantelleria

Marianna and Paul are on vacation on the volcanic island. He is a young photographer, she is a rock legend. Often naked and alone, they frolic in the pool, but unexpectedly, Marianne's ex-partner and music producer, Harry, arrives with their daughter Penelope. Loquacious, intrusive, and perpetually over the top, he creates a situation that is both amusing and embarrassing at the same time, with shivers of vitality and exciting dissatisfactions. Especially since the rockstar, after an accident, cannot speak and must recover her voice.

Remake of the 1969 film, La Piscina, this splash presents us with a violent and ambivalent landscape, made of luxuries and excesses in a Mediterranean that is a graveyard for migrants. A quadrangular triangle: the privileged are closed in their fortresses, even mental ones, with compulsive bodies, at the mercy of passions, frivolities, and pleasures. Those who disrupt the balance can only be part of it, while those outside it only experience a presence-absence.

We are all obscene, says Harry, we know it, and yet we love each other.

A frantic film, with an erotically pulsating rhythm that takes on the appearance of a slightly deranged thriller. Until it outlines the grotesque traits of a fierce satire on an embarrassing Italy.

Wealth begets monsters while poverty drowns.

A madness, that of Guadagnino, which captures, with a smirk, the contradictions of a narrative engaged with the absurd.