On the third day of the festival two of its most eagerly anticipated galas grabbed the headlines. The Love strand chose ‘A Bigger Splash’; a dark, abrasive relationships drama celebrating the pleasure of the senses with obscene abandon. The festival’s own one was Ben Wheatley’s ‘High-Rise’, a wild satire about social collapse. A rollercoaster of very diverse thrills suitably complemented with the frights provided by superior chiller ‘The Invitation’.
The cinema of Italian director Luca Guadagnino seems to be rooted in European genres popular during the 60s and 70s. His previous film, ‘I am love’, shook the cobwebs off a certain type of melodrama and ‘A Bigger Splash’ is a remake of Jacques Deray’s 1969 classic ‘La Piscine’, adding a brass contemporary touch of sexy amorality to the original’s complex study on jealousy and seduction.
Guadagnino’s muse Tilda Swinton and Matthias Schoenaerts fill in the shoes of Romy Schneider and Alain Delon, as the rock diva who’s recovering from an operation on her vocal chords and her partner, taking a break together in a lovely Italian island. The arrival of an hedonistic record producer–Ralph Fiennes stealing the show-, friend of her partner and former flame of the diva, will made unresolved affairs resurface, aroused by the easy sensuality of their Mediterranean surroundings. To complicate things further, he brings along his young daughter, Dakota Johnson, who is striving for attention and will make her way into the triangle, building up the tensions between them up to tragic levels.
Tagged as obscene by the most conservative part of the critics, ‘A Bigger Splash’ is a finely acted complex drama, the kind you don’t see often these days. At the very least it could take the prize for best looking cast of the festival. ★★★★
Boasting another handsome cast, headed by Tom Hiddleston, Elizabeth Moss, Sienna Miller, Luke Evans and Jeremy Irons, British director Ben Wheatley returns with a rather faithful adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s dystopian cult novel ‘High-Rise’, for a long time considered unfilmable.
A frantic satire of social collapse set in a luxury apartments’ tower, Ballard encapsulated the, still ongoing, architectural and social ideals of progress from the seventies and turned them upside down, most of which feels painfully prophetic. Tom Hiddleston does a good job as psychologist Dr. Robert Laing, representing the arrival of a new kind of professional that’s common fare nowadays, courted by both upper and lower classes, but totally detached from both; ready to take what he needs to thrive, regardless of circumstances.
The film perfectly recreates the aesthetics of the era with its brutalist architecture location, similar of such self-contained concrete projects as the Barbican. As well as a changing social structure with the designer, Royal (an always excellent Jeremy Irons), living in an out of this world penthouse above the multiple floors forming a class pyramid, ranking down to the humbler professionals of the lower floors. Their rowdy, self-elected representative, Wilder (Luke Evans) will lead the ‘peasants’ revolt as the advertised promises of life like a non-stop party begins to be truth just for the people in the higher floors, whereas cracks in the building and the failure of its services cripple the existence of everyone else. From there it all descent into chaos, as the fabric of society, too dependent on technological crutches and numbed down by mindless hedonism, disintegrates without them.
The long central scenes of neighbourhood madness make the storyline share the chaos, feeling too bloated in parts, and its production values could have been a bit slicker, but Ben Wheatley’s proves himself again as one of the UK’s bravest directors with what’s bound to become a future cult classic. ★★★½
Also screened yesterday, Karyn Kusama’s tense shocker ‘The Invitation’, in which delving in the dark side of LA’s keenness for new age spirituality, the director builds up the scares using the familiar setting of an old friends reunion, years after a tragic event hit their lives. When the hosts reveal they have joined a cult and would like to share their findings to help everyone heal their pain, events escalate out of control. ★★★