NEW YORK—In a sleek, luxurious Manhattan hotel room, Tilda Swinton stands and announces that she’s bound to break something. “If not you then me,” she says cheerfully.
That the stark interior would, in even a brief stay, be in jeopardy from Swinton shouldn’t be surprising. Few confines have ever been able to hold the shape-shifting, convention-bursting actress.
But to say she’s a chameleon doesn’t quite do justice to Swinton’s myriad transformations: flickers of flesh that bend with the light or mood, alternatively illuminating her and retreating behind masks. She plays people perpetually in flux. Even “Tilda Swinton” is illusory.
“I simply do not buy that identity isn’t fluid,” she says. “I’m not sure that identity exists. For a long time, I noticed that the stories I was drawn to making were the stories of people who were caught in a concept of ‘OK, that’s me’ and they came up against a wall and had to transform.”
In Luca Guadagnino’s “A Bigger Splash,” Swinton plays Marianne Lane, a rock star on the other side of a metamorphosis being pulled back to her prior self. She’s resting her voice after surgery on her vocal chords on an idyllic getaway on the Sicilian island of Pantelleria with her brooding beau (Matthias Schoenaerts).
But her jaunty, hard-living producer and former flame Harry (Ralph Fiennes) turns up, along with his newly discovered daughter (Dakota Johnson). Like a film noir villain, Harry brings with him all her rollicking past, and the foursome settle in for a tense holiday. (The film is a riff on 1969’s “La Piscine.”)
(Following the recent interview, Swinton would become entangled in a controversy over her casting as the Ancient One in Marvel’s “Doctor Strange.” The character has traditionally been Tibetan but in the upcoming film will be Celtic.)
“A Bigger Splash” is Swinton’s fourth film with Guadagnino, the Italian director of “I Am Love,” a lush feast of a movie. Together, they’ve pursued what Swinton calls “sensational cinema” where you can almost taste the food or feel the sun on your skin.
