A Bigger Splash (Luca Guadagnino, 2015)

Named decoyishly after the Hockney painting, A Bigger Splash is nevertheless a fairly non-divergent remake of La Piscine, to the point that even the characters' names aren't changed, with Tilda Swinton taking the Romy Schneider role and Matthias Schoenaerts the Alain Delon one, albeit that this time the former is the dominant power in their relationship as a Bowie-ish rock star who's recovering from laryngitis. But the change in gender dynamics is possibly the film's one concession to modern times, despite a sub-plot involving refugees flooding to the Mediterranean island where the couple are staying on holiday.
Their seemingly contented sojourn is rudely shaken up by the arrival of Ralph Fiennes's record producer, a former lover of Swinton, together with his sultry daughter. Fiennes has a field day with the role, boisterous, drunken and talking a mile a minute, with Swinton forced to be non-verbally reactive, and they are the best thing about the film by a long chalk. In contrast, the sexual tension that the set-up tries to generate to justify the descent into chaos that occurs is weak and unconvincing. It would have been far better to use the source as just a starting point and then create a new story focused on the Fiennes and Swinton characters, since nothing of value is actually added - even the photography is deliberately 1960s arthouse, with its sudden unnaturalistic zooms - and the refugee story in the background only serves as a gloss of contemporary flavour. One suspects that the director's upcoming remake of Suspiria, featuring the female leads from this, will likewise do nothing to validate itself.

5/10