Villa Malaparte - Capri. image: Poet Architecture
The summer on screen: how vacation architecture can reveal darker passions
Writer: Pete Collard
The remarkable Villa Malaparte is set precariously into the cliffs above Punta Massullo on the island of Capri, its widening terracotta steps leading up to a minimalist roof terrace that offers sweeping views across the Gulf of Salerno. The villa was built in 1942 for the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, who designed much of the house himself in collaboration with a local stonemason, having rejected the initial plans prepared by the architect Adalberto Libera.
Following the writer’s death in 1957 the house was abandoned, but four years later it became one of the locations for the film Le Mépris, directed by Luc Godard and based on Alberto Moravia’s novel Il disprezzo (A Ghost at Noon). Starring Brigitte Bardot and Jack Palance, the empty and decaying external areas of the villa were used by Godard to symbolise the growing emotional distance between the characters, as well as artistically framing Bardot’s nude sunbathing.
Le Mépris, dir: Luc Godard (Embassy Pictures 1963)
Le Mépris, dir: Luc Godard (Embassy Pictures 1963)
Despite the sense of existential angst and malaise lying behind the sunny facade, Le Mépris was one of a number of films from the era to bring the glamour of the European summer to cinema screens around the world, Along the coast in France, another revealing performance by Brigitte Bardot in Roger Vadim’s And God Created Woman helped to create Saint-Tropez’s position as the holiday destination of the 1950s. Even Alfred Hitchcock recognised the beauty and symbolism of the Mediterranean coastline, shooting Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in To Catch A Thief on the winding coastal road between Nice and Monte Carlo.
The socially neutral setting of the holiday villa gives a theatrical sense of grandeur while allowing a slow walk towards intimacy at the same time
Today the architecture and landscape of summer remain an enduring and evocative cinematic language. Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name offers the rambling Villa Albergoni in the Lombardia town of Moscazzano as the backdrop for his coming-of-age story. Set in the summer of 1983, the teenage Elio Perlman falls in love with Oliver, a research assistant who has come work with his academic father for the summer. The socially neutral setting of the holiday villa gives a theatrical sense of grandeur while allowing a slow walk towards intimacy at the same time.
Call Me By Your Name, dir: Luca Guadagnino (Sony Pictures 2017)
As Elio and his family enjoy lazy bike rides, al fresco dining and relaxing dips in the rustic swimming pool, the Villa interior offers the Perlman’s a cool respite to the summer heat, and boasts an eclectic range of new and old design styles. Posters for the Venice Art Biennale and a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition mix effortlessly with Asian wall hangings and 16th-century ceiling frescos by Aurelio Busso, a pupil of Raphael, to create the perfect [if not highly cultured] vacation retreat. (At the time of writing the 15,000-square-foot villa, with eight bedrooms and seven bathrooms, is on the market for €1.7m)
Call Me By Your Name, dir: Luca Guadagnino (Sony Pictures 2017)
Guadagnino’s previous work, A Bigger Splash, was also centred around a holiday villa, this time located high in the rocky hills of the island of Pantelleria, south of Sicily. Named after David Hockney’s painting of the same name, the film sees fading rock star Marianne (played by Tilda Swinton) and her partner Paul (Matthias Schoenaerts) enjoying their Mediterranean idyll before it is disturbed by unannounced guests. The exquisitely tiled pool creates a haven from the dusty, volcanic landscape surrounding the villa, but also helps to exaggerate the growing sexual tension and anxiety among the group in the process.
The intimacy of the pool, enticing in the sunshine, has become a place that film directors pour meaning into
A Bigger Splash demonstrates how the swimming pool, like the holiday villa, can yield deeper cinematic meaning, while also being architecturally seductive and beautiful to shoot. The pool can mean luxury, leisure, passion and intrigue, yet most frequently the calm tranquility of the water seems to invite disruption, as seen most readily in François Ozon’s Swimming Pool. The peace of Charlotte Rampling’s writing retreat in Provence is shattered by the arrival of her publisher’s promiscuous daughter, their mutual disdain descending into events far more violent and Hitchcock-esque.
A Bigger Splash, dir: Luca Guadagnino (Studio Canal 2016)
A Bigger Splash, dir: Luca Guadagnino (Studio Canal 2016)
Across the Atlantic, the domestic swimming pool became an important status symbol in the second half of the 20th-century, yet cinematically has often been used as a device to indicate moral or personal decay. The eponymous graduate from Mike Nichols’ 1967 film, finds Benjamin (played by Dustin Hoffman) languishing idly in his parents pool, and as he drifts aimlessly through post-university summer, only his affair with his neighbour Mrs Robinson (Anne Bancroft) can offer an escape from the sterility of his suburban surroundings and his growing disdain for his parents’ aspirations for him.
The Graduate, dir: Mike Nichols (United Artists 1967)
The Graduate, dir: Mike Nichols (United Artists 1967)
Frank Perry’s The Swimmer offers an even darker take on the faux-utopian pool life of the late 1960s, as Burt Lancaster attempts to ‘swim’ home through all the neighbourhood gardens that stretch between him and his own house down the valley in suburban Connecticut. As he navigates his way home he joins a series of bourgeois garden parties and lunches, meeting old and new friends, with each swimming pool offering a chance to cleanse and redeem himself for the actions of his past.
The Swimmer, dir: Frank Perry (Columbia Pictures 1968)
The Swimmer, dir: Frank Perry (Columbia Pictures 1968)
Films like And God Created Woman helped to popularise Europe’s southern coastline, offering a sense of glamour and style that could yield potential holiday destinations to audiences. Yet cinematically the architecture of such summer locales has offered directors a chance to explore the depths of each character’s persona. The seductive neutrality of each location, with the change in behaviours that new scenery or temporary accommodation can bring, resulting in a loosening of the traditional social order.
Meanwhile, the gentle lapping of the swimming pool, decorative but equally functional, and bringing a necessary absence of clothing, creates a unique and highly stylised social environment. The intimacy of the pool, enticing in the sunshine, has become a place that film directors pour meaning into – the desirable, over-exposed setting in which to exaggerate underlying romantic rivalry, sexual tension or worse, as the cold blue water elicits even darker behaviours. §
Le Mépris and And God Created Woman are available to purchase on Blu-ray and DVD from The Criterion Collection. Call Me By Your Name is out now on Blu-ray and DVD from Sony Pictures.
