30/01/2024 - Modern dance, unexpected nudity and the trials of the privileged are all on display in Justin Anderson’s adaptation of Deborah Levy’s novel

A war correspondent, her blocked Bosnian poet husband and a skinny-dipping botanist all walk into the same photogenic Greek villa. It’s not the set-up for a joke: they are the dramatis personae who fashion filmmaker Justin Anderson hopes to collide with one another in his feature debut, Swimming Home. The source novel, from eminent British author Deborah Levy, explores this scenario with chilly, experimental prose, forswearing any absurdity and holding the reader rapt; Anderson attacks this same material with undeniable confidence and swagger, yet the result is unconvincing and tonally askew. This A-lister-studded international co-production has premiered in IFFR’s Tiger Competition.

Set in Greece, but spiritually taking place just down the way from A Bigger Splash [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Luca Guadagnino
film profile]’s Italian villa of depravity, Swimming Home is a drama of psychological cracks and fissures which eventually abandons subtlety for forced hothouse eroticism. The facade of the handsome central couple – Joe (Christopher Abbott), an émigré poet mourning his elusive literary fame, and Isabel (Mackenzie Davis), a celebrated war reporter – seems primed to crumble even before they find Kitti (Ariane Labed, strongly calling upon her dance background) floating nude in their pool with the stillness of a corpse. But she’s anything but dead: rather, she’s physically composing herself before she beckons her new hosts into a striking epiphany. Kitti is a friend of the couple’s chauffeur and host, who apparently didn’t realise they were arriving soon; as they are intrigued by this similar eccentric bohemian, or just jaded regarding the potential consequences, she’s permitted to stay.

Swimming Home is also set in a filmic world several degrees away from real, from the tart and stilted repartee of the actors’ dialogue to its later sequences in a fetish-dance club and nudist lagoon that feel like landscapes of the unconscious. The key to the plot trajectory is Joe’s lasting mental scars from his parents’ evacuating him amidst the Bosnian War; Anderson explains this complex event devoid of any detail that would render it more concrete or palpable (indeed, in the novel, Joe is Polish, with a typical profile of a dissident Eastern Bloc-era writer, and far older than Abbott). Whilst Abbott’s acting suggests clinical depression, rather than conveying the violent hallucinations that he’s plagued with (which also don’t realistically cohere with Isabel’s equal trust and disinterest in him), Kitti’s flirtatious pursuit of him and respect for his poetry allow her to become an ambiguous screen on which he expels all of his trauma.

In the text, these events are fully mediated through the couple’s accompanying daughter Nina (played in the film by Freya Hannan-Mills), revelling in fragmentation and gesturing to the inaccessibility of others’ consciousnesses and subjectivities. Anderson’s approach, whilst abounding in dazed beauty, is far more literal, and also at cross-purposes about whether he pities these bourgeois-bohos or sees them as fodder for contemptuous satire.

Swimming Home is a production by the UK, Greece, the Netherlands and Brazil, staged by Anti Worlds, Quiddity Films, Reagent Media, Heretic, Head Gear Films and Lemming Film. Its world sales are overseen by Bankside Films.