The film unfolds on the small Italian island of Pantelleria, where Marianne Lane, a famous rock singer recovering from throat surgery, enjoys a quiet holiday with her filmmaker boyfriend, Paul De Smedt.
Their intimacy is initially undisturbed until the intrusion of Marianne’s former lover, Harry Hawkes, and his daughter, Penelope, sparks a chain of events fueled by jealousy, betrayal, and suppressed desires.
Tensions rise quickly as Harry revives old flames with Marianne while simultaneously creating friction with Paul. Penelope’s provocative presence adds to the charged atmosphere, complicating the relationships further.
The rivalry between Paul and Harry culminates in a violent confrontation by the pool, where Harry drowns after Paul holds him underwater in a moment that is left ambiguous: was it accidental or intentional? Paul’s subsequent attempt to revive Harry fails, forcing him to leave Harry’s body submerged.
The mystery deepens as the police investigate, distracted by larger issues such as refugee landings, allowing the villa inhabitants to provide conflicting accounts.
Marianne pushes the narrative that an unknown intruder might be responsible, deflecting suspicion from Paul. The island’s serene beauty thus contrasts sharply with the darkness of secrets and lies bubbling beneath the surface.
Morality and Manipulation: Marianne’s Choices and the Mystery of Penelope
Marianne’s character offers one of the film’s central tensions. Though she professes love for Harry, she also claims loyalty to Paul, embodying a fractured vulnerability.
Her silence due to surgery symbolizes the limited communication and hidden truths she harbors. When the police question the occupants, Marianne’s willingness to shift blame onto external forces, such as the refugees nearby, raises uncomfortable ethical questions about self-preservation and scapegoating.
Penelope remains the most mysterious figure. Officially Harry’s daughter, it is revealed she is younger than she claims and fully fluent in Italian, despite allowing other characters to struggle with the language.
Her ambiguous actions, especially her quiet observation of the heated conflicts and her interactions with Paul, create an unsettling presence.
A Bigger Splash (Credit: Amazon Prime Video)
At the film’s conclusion, as Penelope departs the island, she delivers a cryptic remark echoing Marianne’s own words, provoking a visible reaction. Marianne’s slap conveys deep emotional turmoil, while Penelope’s tears during her departure underscore her complex role as both observer and catalyst.
The film leaves Penelope’s intentions and knowledge open to interpretation, inviting viewers to question her true impact on the events.
The Subtle Tensions Beneath Desire and Power
Beyond the central murder mystery and relationship drama, the film explores themes of desire, power play, and the fragile nature of control. Harry’s confident, domineering personality contrasts with Paul’s more subdued demeanor, yet both men reveal vulnerabilities in their battle for Marianne’s affection and emotional dominance.
Director Luca Guadagnino uses the island’s isolation to amplify the characters’ claustrophobia, both physical and emotional. Marianne’s voicelessness intensifies the lack of clear communication, even as the characters’ desires speak loudly in their behaviors.
The pool serves as a symbolic setting where boundaries dissolve between friends and lovers, between aggression and intimacy.
The unresolved nature of the characters’ interactions leaves the film’s impact lingering. The question of who truly controls the narrative, or who holds power in this isolated paradise, remains elusive. The film suggests that beneath the glamorous exterior lies a fragile web of secrets, jealousy, and shifting loyalties.
The finale of A Bigger Splash refuses a neat resolution, instead offering a mosaic of tensions that evoke both the personal cost of desire and the moral ambiguity of survival.
Marianne, Paul, Harry, and Penelope are caught in a delicate dance of vulnerability and manipulation, the ripples of which extend far beyond their sunlit island refuge.
This psychological drama gains depth from its rich character work and atmospheric direction, leaving viewers to piece together the implications long after the credits roll.
Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire closes on an image that lingers. Marianne, the painter, sits hidden within a crowd at an orchestra. Across the hall, Héloïse, now older and married, sits alone, oblivious to Marianne’s gaze.
As the first notes of Vivaldi’s “Summer” from The Four Seasons swell through the theater, the camera lingers on Héloïse’s face as emotion pours out, raw and uncontrollable.
Why has this ending, mostly wordless and observed from a distance, grabbed the attention of audiences and critics? The answer sits in Sciamma’s bold refusal to reunite her central lovers or provide emotional catharsis through dialogue. Instead, memory does the heavy lifting.
As Marianne’s perspective fills the frame, viewers are forced to feel the ache of impossible love and the distance that time and social circumstance enforce. This is not a film about triumphant romance against all odds, but about the indelible mark left by true love, no matter how brief its duration.
What’s especially powerful is how music becomes character. Earlier, Marianne played this tense, stormy Vivaldi piece on the piano for Héloïse, imprinting joy and awe into a single, fleeting moment.
Years later, watching Héloïse swept up by the same music, Marianne and the audience witnesses see pain and joy collide through sobs and memory. It’s cinéma vérité for heartbreak: nothing is explained, but everything is felt.
The silence between notes, the unbroken focus on faces, and the total absence of dialogue heighten the moment. The film substitutes dramatic confrontation for the loneliness of observing someone you love from afar, an experience as authentic as any heartfelt reunion.
Art and the Gaze: Who Gets to Remember?
Audiences and critics have pointed out that , aside from its love story, Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a meta-text about art’s ability and inability to hold onto fleeting happiness.
Throughout the film, Marianne creates a portrait of Héloïse, but the wider narrative is really about who gets to look and who is left looking. Art becomes both a testimony and a prison for memory, making the lovers’ story immortal but unreachable.
This theme is driven home by recurring visual metaphors: Marianne spots a painting of Héloïse at a gallery, years after they parted ways.
In the portrait, Héloïse’s finger marks the page of a book. It’s Marianne’s self-portrait, a secret signal sewn into art, proof that Héloïse held onto what she could of their relationship, even as time and duty moved her elsewhere.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Credit: Amazon Prime Video)
The “female gaze,” a staple of Sciamma’s work, shapes the entire experience, both story-wise and visually. Men are nearly absent. Women observe, love, and remember each other, the camera never looking away. The result is a film where the act of looking is never passive.
When Marianne gazes at Héloïse across the orchestra seats, she exercises both longing and agency, choosing memory over disruption.
Sciamma herself has stated that a conventional “happy ending” felt out of place. Instead, the film interrogates what lasting happiness really means. Should love be about possession or enduring impact? She argues that memories, bittersweet as they are, may nurture future joys.
The story echoes the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, invoked explicitly: sometimes, turning back to look and remember matters more than moving on without a trace.
Painting Painful Progress: The Power and Limits of Love’s Remnants
Portrait of a Lady on Fire makes explicit how love stories rarely get to bloom on their own terms, particularly when stifled by patriarchal tradition and historical circumstance. Both Marianne and Héloïse are women tethered by their eras.
But unlike so many screen romances, Sciamma’s script denies them tragic self-destruction or blissful escape. The world continues; their lives continue, but the memory, kindled by music and art, is what survives.
Directorial choices amplify this message at every turn. Sciamma’s use of color and lighting, especially around the central motif of fire, mirrors the way suppressed feelings flicker within the boundaries of social expectation.
Critics have highlighted how the film uses visual contrasts: the blue of Héloïse’s dresses, the warmth of candlelight, and the transformative night at the bonfire to signal moments of risk, desire, and liberation.
Even in its closing seconds, the movie resists neat answers. The camera’s lingering stare on Héloïse’s tear-streaked face during Vivaldi’s crescendo invites each viewer to decide: is this a defeat, a victory, or something more complicated?
For many, it is a radical affirmation that heartbreak and happiness, memory and hope, often share the same frame. Few recent films have captured the tension of moving forward while looking back quite as poignantly.
