Swimming Home (2024)

Swimming Home

Mournful, hard and laughable this film of Deborah Levy’s Swimming Home is a real wrong one. Director and artist Justin Anderson has made a name for himself as a visually imaginative talent but here he seems to have pulled leaden, terrible performances from his strong cast, crowding them with fussy, over-determined closeups. His film insists on an unaccountably unsexy and uninteresting kind of erotic tension and confuses it with a supposed repressed agony from the Bosnian war which is invoked in the most casual and cursory way.

Joe (Christopher Abbott) is a famous poet who is arriving at a luxurious holiday villa in Greece with his American wife Isabel (Mackenzie Davis), who claims to be a foreign correspondent back from some traumatic assignment. Joe is depressed and blocked; Isabel is subdued after the (unspecified) horrors on which she has just been reporting their marriage has been troubled. But you wouldn’t guess how deliberate this numbed behaviour is supposed to be from either performance.

With them are their moody teen daughter Nina (Freya Hannan-Mills), their driver, and their stylish academic friend from Paris, Laura (Nadine Labaki). On arrival they find there’s a beautiful young naked woman drifting in their pool this is Kitti (played by the charismatic Ariane Labed).

She turns out to be a friend of the driver’s, who apologetically offers to find her somewhere else in town. But perhaps inhibited by the need to show herself airily unconcerned by bourgeois scruple, perhaps further angrily needing to test her husband’s fidelity or whatever, Isabel insists that Kitti stay – and her guest’s disruptive charm begins to work on all present.

Clearly the sexy swimming pool setup will recall Jacques Deray’s La Piscine of 1969, with Alain Delon, Romy Schneider and Jane Birkin remade by Luca Guadagnino as A Bigger Splash in 2015 with Ralph Fiennes and Dakota Johnson. There may also be something in the title from the John Cheever short story adapted as The Swimmer in 1968 with Burt Lancaster. None of these resemblances hurt the film at all, but it is so strangely lifeless, lacking the sensuality and languor that should surely be there.

The oddest thing of all is that habitually on various walks to the beach the characters keep chancing across a group of naked sunbathing people round about; at one stage, a muscular nude man on a boat is striking a pose while holding up a lit flare (in daylight). “Take me with you!” Isabel calls out to him wanly.

These naked people may or may not have something to do with Isabel’s strange memories or fantasies of being at some kind of sex club dance cabaret where the performers keep doing the upside down “crab” position much favoured by the possessed girl in The Exorcist. In response, Isabel does a pained expression: classic “smell the fart” acting, as Joey Tribbiani put it in Friends.

And it is still going on, very much aware of itself and showing different sides which we never expected from Kitti and possible futures for Joe are appearing right in front of him while his painful childhood memories are coming back. From time to time the film becomes alive, if only it stops looking so serious without any reason.

I enjoyed that surrealistic scene when Isabel takes a pony to a restaurant by the beach and the owner almost chokes with anger. But this movie doesn’t work at all.

Watch Swimming Home For Free On Gomovies.