For fans of adventurous cinema in the last decade, a pairing between actors Christopher Abbott and Mackenzie Davis arrives like the answer to an unspoken prayer. Both performers have dependably elevated small indies and big tentpoles alike with invigorating performances that turn heads no matter the size of the role. Yet even a duo as gifted as they cannot rescue “Swimming Home,” a languid and lugubrious European-set drama that leaves them both stranded.
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It’s not for lack of trying on the actors’ part. As war-reporter wife Isabel and tortured poet husband Joe, respectively, Davis and Abbott have their reasons for playing coy and closed-minded characters. Even on holiday with their teenage daughter Nina (Freya Hannan-Mills) and against an idyllic Grecian backdrop, the silence of their separate experience speaks volumes. Or it would, rather, if screenwriter/director Justin Anderson could find a language through which the film could communicate anything of substance.
Though Anderson cut his teeth in music videos, commercials, and other visual art, “Swimming Home” is a doggy paddle when it comes to cinema. He models his feature directorial debut after sensual, sun-kissed classics like “La Piscine”—or its contemporary revamp, “A Bigger Splash”— which take a more economical approach to doling out dialogue and story. Not much happens here plot-wise beyond one surprising development upon the family’s arrival at their vacation villa: the fully nude Kitti (Ariane Labed) leisurely floating in their pool. Rather than shooing away the unintended visitor, Isabel welcomes Kitti as a guest in the spare room and ensures all bets are off for the stay.
“Swimming Home” proceeds not as a gradual tan from this inciting event. Instead, it’s a sunburn resulting from the brief yet intense burst of Kitti’s light. Anderson dwells in the discomfort from the unexpected scrambling of their social arrangements. But there’s a flaw in such an approach of pressing down on the skin of the characters like this: it reveals the hollowness of their construction underneath.
Like many a freshman director leaping the big screen, Anderson’s approach to directing proves overly deferential to his actors. He’s counting on the accumulated knowledge of Abbott and Davis to help paper over the gaps in the paper-thin translation of Deborah Levy’s novel of the same name. Yet their minimal interior performances still need guidance toward a shared vision. Under the guise of empowering his lead actors, Anderson immobilizes them without a string tying together their pearls.
“Swimming Home” frustrates with its sense of fragmentation. It does not feel like just an echo of the cinematography, which favors placing characters in individual frames rather than shared shots. Rather, the fractured feeling is more from the film, lacking a center of gravity. To say the film floats might imply some level of gracefulness in its form. “Swimming Home” bobs up and down in alternation between surface-level and symbolic modes to aggravating effect.
Anderson bobs in and out of scenes, which just seem to … finish. People talk in them, but platitudes come out as if every line could be the one directly before the title card drops in the trailer. Events happen in succession, but the momentum never builds. “Swimming Home” treads water for far too long as if waiting for a protagonist to emerge, but no one ever does. An entire subplot involving Nina’s sexual awakening, for example, just disappears without resolution.
While tempting to write off any of the film’s vagueness as channeling Michaelangelo Antonioni’s stylistic playbook, “Swimming Home” never earns such benefit of the doubt. Using absence to suggest presence, a central sleight of hand in the New Wave toolkit Anderson so admires, requires a firm authorial attunement to pulse and energy. “Swimming Home,” on the other hand, provides the cinematic equivalent of a sullen sulk. The inscrutability becomes enervating early in the film, and even something of a jolting twist at the close cannot reinvigorate it.
It’s easy to isolate individual elements of “Swimming Home” worthy of commendation—Labed’s effortless channeling of the siren’s song or the choreography of Candela Capitán that provides much more to the plot than initially meets the eye. But a film is not just the sum of its parts. A director must make it more. Without such a vision, Justin Anderson proves putting all these components together can even make them less. [C-]