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‘Swimming Home’ Review: Christopher Abbott and Mackenzie Davis’ Strange, Sunstruck but Frigid Summer Vacation
Justin Anderson adapts Deborah Levy's novel 'Swimming Home' to striking but spotty effect in this Rotterdam premiere, starring Christopher Abbott.
Recently premiered in competition at the Rotterdam Film Festival, “Swimming Home” may prove too elusive and short on feeling to draw the arthouse distributors that might otherwise be lured by its name actors and familiarly sexy premise: A free-spirited stranger aggravates tensions between a drifting couple over the course of a long, hot Mediterranean vacation. The road, on an unidentified island in what appears to be Greece, leads to a modern, high-end beach villa being rented for the summer by Josef (Abbott), a renowned poet in the throes of a creative drought, and his wife Isabel (Davis), an intrepid war reporter who admits to feeling less at home with her family than she does in the midst of a combat zone. Its chief pleasures, then, lie in sensory details: the sun-fuzzed grain, citrussy color stories and woozily flooded lighting of Simos Sarketzis’ cinematography, often slicing the actors’ bodies into alien closeups; the consistently uncanny sonic intrusions of the score, merging organic and synthetic sounds into fidgety aural chaos; or the crisp lines and busy prints of Oliver Garcia’s costumes, which subtly outline the class dynamics at play, while permitting all involved to be elegant in their misery.
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