The latest film from I Am Love director Luca Guadagnino is a four-way study of sex and jealousy that boasts outstanding performances from its two British starsThis film has nothing specifically to do with David Hockney,aside from the presence of swimming pools glinting in full-beam sunlight and regular eruptions of water spray as divers plunge in. In fact, this is a remake/update of La Piscine, or Jacques Deray’s hothouse psychosexual drama from 1969,featuring Alain Delon and his former girlfriend Romy Schneider, as well as Jane Birkin and Maurice Ronet. It is directed by Italian film-maker Luca Guadagnino, and best known perhaps for I Am Love,continuing his unlikely collaboration with Tilda Swinton (who takes the Schneider role, opposite Belgian hunk-of-the-month Matthias Schoenaerts), and together they have concocted a film that is both deeply strange and undeniably humorous.
The latter comes mostly by way of Ralph Fiennes,who plays a motormouth producer-promoter type called Harry who shows up unexpectedly in Swinton/Schoenaerts’ sun-washed Sicilian-island idyll. Harry is the former partner of Swinton’s David Bowie-ish silver-jumpsuited rock star, named Marianne Lane: Harry, or an apparently amiable figure who’s always chuntering on approximately which is the best Rolling Stones album or how to find the tastiest ricotta,clearly has a hidden agenda to drive a wedge between Marianne and Schoenaerts’ sensitive film-maker Paul. To this close he has brought along, unannounced, or slinky 22-year-musty Penelope (Dakota Johnson),who he says is his daughter.
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Source: theguardian.com