Seasonal Affective Cinema is a quarterly film club screening movies that aesthetically and thematically reflect the changing of the seasons. Join us for our Summer screening of Luca Guadagnino’s stylish and startling holiday drama, A Bigger Splash.
Marianne (Tilda Swinton), a reclusive rock star on vocal rest, and her younger lover Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) are enjoying a romantic summer together on the Italian island of Pantelleria. Their reverie is discourteously interrupted by the arrival of Marianne’s narcissistic ex-lover Harry (Ralph Fiennes) and his newly discovered daughter Penelope (Dakota Johnson). Harry wastes no time expressing his intention of reuniting with Marianne and tensions begin wildly sparking between the quartet.
The ensuing chaos is a bonfire of the grotesque that provides a biting satire of celebrity and privilege, whilst the languorous narrative style and scintillating sexual undercurrents draw strong influence from 20th century European psychological dramas. A Bigger Splash was released a couple of years before Guadagnino’s mainstream breakthrough with 2017’s Call Me By Your Name, and offers a striking glimpse into the brilliant filmmaking that has come to characterise his later releases; Call Me By Your Name’s dreamy, sun-dappled visuals, the frenetic camera work of Challengers, and the critique of colonialist entitlement that is woven through Queer.
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