Splitsville: Michael Angelo Covino on the chaos and physical comedy of couple swap movie

Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin have now played onscreen best friends twice, and both times, one of their characters have jumped into bed with the other’s partner.

Should we be reading something into that?

“We’re still working on it, but neither of us have slept with the other’s partner yet, but there’s still plenty of life to live, so we’ll see!” Covino told The Nightly.

He was joking, of course, but that irreverence and conviviality is threaded throughout the two films the men have made together (Covino is the director while he and Marvin write the screenplays) – the lesser seen but raucous bromance The Climb and now Splitsville, a rom-com farce that premiered at Cannes this year.

Partner swaps is key to Splitsville’s comedy and conflict. There’s Carey (Marvin), the easygoing guy married to Ashley (Adria Arjona), and Paul (Covino), whose partner is Julie (Dakota Johnson).

Splitsville opens with Carey and Ashley in the car, driving to Paul and Julie’s home, when Ashley confesses she had an affair and she wants out of their marriage. That makes for an awkward visit when Carey shows up alone, breaking the news to their couple friends.

That’s when Paul and Julie tells him that the secret sauce to their seemingly successful union is they have an open relationship. The revelation leads to, you guessed it, some bed hopping between the friends, and a reckoning that no one is who they think they are.

“We got really excited about this idea of a couple who are constantly talking about, ‘We’re open, everything’s great, we’ve got it all figured out, sure, you guys can sleep together, it wouldn’t bother me’.

“But then their reaction is not what they said their reaction would be, which is absolutely unhinged, physical chaos.

“That was one of the very first things that we discovered as an idea, that made us go, ‘Oh man, this would be really fun to make’. Now, we’re getting into the really comedic truths of characters.”

Covino has observed and listened to his friends who have been in open relationships, and many of them told him they had to stop. For one thing, there’s too many conservations, so much talking whenever anyone has any kind of emotion.

But it’s not the endless talking or weaponised couples therapy language that is at the core of Splitsville’s wicked sense of humour. It’s more primal than that. Covino and Marvin uses physical comedy to drive home the chaos of their characters’ turmoil. The internal is manifested as the external.

One of the centrepieces of the film is a knock-down, drag-out fight, but rather than menacing, it’s messy. Paul and Carey are two men who have never set foot inside a UFC octagon, so the scuffle – the flailing limbs, using the environment – reflects who they are.

“With the fight scene, you understand the deep jealousy that my character is experiencing, so it gives us more latitude to keep it going. We know what’s driving the scene, it’s not just a fight scene for the sake of a fight scene.”

Covino may have only directed two films but the embrace of physical comedy already feels like a signature. It reverberates through an audience with a visceral feeling. At the Sydney Film Festival premiere in June, at which Covino was present, he felt that audience shared in the humour more than other screenings around the world.

“(Physical comedy) has been the go-to since the advent of cinema. When people first started rolling cameras, they said, ‘OK, let’s have someone fall down’,” Covino said.

“Or, let’s someone step on a hose and look at it, and then someone steps off the hose and the water sprays in their face. There’s a reason why that’s universally funny. It creates a game that we understand clearly and you could play it a thousand years from now and it’ll be funny to someone.

“Whereas a very talky movie that’s zeitgeisty from 10 years ago might not resonate in the same way.

“We’re always looking for the universality of themes, ideas and characters that could be understood across cultures at any time.”

Covino grew up on slapstick comedy, and was introduced to Charlie Chaplin when he was a kid. He said they were some of his and Marvin’s favourite films of any decade.

“Certainly in the nineties, they were a big thing, and there was Jim Carrey. Then I started finding Blake Edwards and watching The Pink Panther, and Arthur Hiller and The In-Laws. Just really, really incredible comedians who did physical comedy.”

What makes the best physical comedy work is how you connect it to the story and the people. In Splitsville, it’s the absurdity of the situations its characters find themselves in, and owning up to truths they’ve never reckoned with.

There’s more to the emotional mess of a couple swap than pratfalls but the topsy-turvy certainly makes it much funnier.

Splitsville is in cinemas on September 11