British writer Deborah Levy’s brief, brilliant novel Swimming Home is a surrealistic summer noir that baffles right up to the end, when it delivers its emotional wallop. Adapting this bare-bones enigma was always going to be tough, and director Justin Anderson makes an impressive if not always convincing stab at translating its hallucinatory, black-humoured strangeness to the screen in his film of the same name, which had its world premiere in the Tiger Competition at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
Christopher Abbott, recently in the spotlight as Alfie in Poor Things, shows himself equally adept at unsympathetic characters in the role of Josef, an established poet and serial philanderer. Josef is surprised to find a naked young woman, Kitty (Greek-French arthouse star Ariane Labed), in the swimming pool when he arrives with his family at their holiday villa on the Greek coast — and even more taken aback when his war reporter wife Isabel (Mackenzie Davis) invites her to stay in the guest house, and his daughter Nina (Freya Hannan-Mills), who is going through puberty, latches on to her for guidance.
Interactions feel stagey, and conversations unnatural; accepting this is far from a work of kitchen-sink realism and having the patience to sit with its riddling symbolism is essential in a film that teases out any contextualising information as long as possible, and in which memorised poetry is recited as barbed warfare over dinner (Surrealist poet Paul Eluard is among the quoted.)
The inevitable flirtation between Kitty and Josef has an air of violent inevitability to it, as if some kind of disaster is impending — but the form this finally takes is shocking and unexpected. Desire is more horrifying than gratifying, an unwelcome force lurking under the modern veneers of this affluent world of glistening swimming pools and the effortless chic that only money can buy. Josef feels entitled to define how things are in his domain (the walls of the house are “terracotta,” not pink, he insists), but the holidayers in Swimming Home carry traumas and impulses in their bodies that their owners cannot always sublimate through eloquent words.
The tortured artist figure is deflated rather than glorified, with Josef a moody and impetuous figure whose literary talents and brooding good looks have brought him outward success, but whose emotional immaturity has wrought much collateral damage on those in his orbit. He was torn apart from his parents in childhood due to conflict in the former Yugoslavia, and has still not come to terms with deep childhood scars of abandonment. Kitty is played by Labed as having a prickliness and unpredictability that seems to court catastrophe, or perhaps just sincere attention in a milieu where others have self-aggrandising agendas. She has an ear for poetry but prefers botany (“roots can solve problems without using brains,” she claims is her main interest in them), in a film which goes all in on the expressive possibilities of bodily physicality.
Trained dancer Labed has shown an aptitude in previous films such as Rachel Tsangari’s Attenberg (2010) for exploring alienation through movement. In Swimming Home she joins with other dancers, their contortions spider-like and unnerving, in embodying characters’ nightmares, like a Greek chorus keeping track of the psychological temperature. Coupled with neon-clad, buff bathers arranged across the rocks, they bring an almost hallucinogenic and absurdist, darkly comical maximalism to the trials of love and longing.
Some changes to the novel are understandable (Kitty is no longer an aspiring poet up against gatekeepers, as the story moves off the text-oriented page; Josef, presumably to make the plot more contemporaneous, is no longer Polish but Bosnian), but alter the story’s emotional architecture in a way that makes the ending more inexplicable and reduces its impact.
Isabel is no spurned and passive victim here; rather, she is self-possessed to the extent that, having clocked Josef’s game long ago and tired of his infidelities, she is engineering an exit. The dangers of reporting from conflict zones do not phase her, and she has been absent a lot; it is being at home that she finds more difficult. Laura (Lebanese director and actress Nadine Labaki, a strong and charismatic presence) plays Josef’s former mentor at the Sorbonne, now holidaying with the couple. Her wry scrutiny tilts the household away from any indulgence of male vanity, in this outlandish and intriguing, if at times impenetrable, reworking of noir ideas of the femme fatale, seduction and betrayal.
Director, screenwriter: Justin Anderson
Cast: Christopher Abbott, Mackenzie Davis, Ariane Labed, Nadine Labaki, Freya Hannan-Mills
Producers: Andy Starke, Giorgos Karnavas, Emily Morgan, Marcos Tellechea, Paula Linhares
Cinematographer: Simos Sarketzis
Editor: Napoleon Stratogiannakis
Production design: Myrte Beltman
Sound design: Nardi Van Dijk
Music: Coti K
Production companies: Anti-Worlds (UK), Quiddity Films (UK), Reagent Media (Brazil), Heretic Films (Greece), Lemming Film (Netherlands)
World sales: Bankside Films
Festival: Rotterdam (Tiger Competition)
In English
99 minutes
