When Patricia Highsmith released “Mr Ripley's Talent” around 1955, she had already made a name for herself and Hitchock enhanced it by filming “Strangers on a Train” with a script by Raymond Chandler. Highsmith had published this novel, her debut, five years earlier. The Ripley saga made Highsmith a popular writer, while her acceptance in academic circles would come later. “
Indifferent to the suffering of others, a sickly egomaniac, the character of Tom Ripley is one of the most brilliant and disturbing creations of the brilliant American writer Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995
,” indicates one of the recent editions.
“Tom glanced over his shoulder and saw the individual coming out of the Green Cage and heading towards him. Tom quickened his pace. “There was no doubt that the man was following him.”
Starting point for one of the most piercing, devastating and disturbing novels of the police genre (defined by specialists as a “psychological thriller”), whose first version led to two memorable films: “A full sun” (1960), French production by René Clement with a young Alain Delon as the protagonist, and “The Talented Mr. Ripley” by Anthony Minghella (1999) with a luxury combo: Matt Damon as Ripley, Jude Law, Phillippe Seymour-Hoffman and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Highstmith wrote four other novels based on Ripley and some also made it to the cinema with the titles “The American Friend” (1977) by Wim Wenders with Dennis Hooper in the lead role and “Ripley's Game” (2002) by Liliana Cavani with John Malkovich .
The same saga is reborn these days through the Netflix miniseries that its director, Steven Zaillan, defined as “a thriller from half a century ago with airs of La Dolce Vita.” Zaillan's artistic creation offers several findings, even though he proposes to return to the original setting of the novel. Zaillan arrived with scrolls as a screenwriter: Schindler's List, Gangs of New York and The Irishman bear his signature.
Patricia Highsmith
Highsmith was born a little over a century ago (1921) in Fort Worth, Texas, the daughter of an artist marriage that dissolved when she was three years old. She bore the surname of her stepfather, Stanley, also an artist. Her childhood was difficult, her life also very complicated between loneliness, alcohol and other sufferings, which was saved by her literary vocation, in which she received advice from her friend Truman Capote.
She lived between her country, England, France and Switzerland, where she died in 1995. She signed her novel “The Price of Salt” as Claire Morgan, in 1952: the lesbian relationship between a lady from high society and a young woman who served in the department stores was too provocative for the society of its time. Highsmith's signature was known recently, when “Carol”, Todd Haynes' film with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara was another success.
But if Carol is a disturbing love novel, Highsmith's name stood out with his suspense works. Graham Greene defined: “Highsmith created an original, closed, irrational, oppressive world, where we enter it with a personal feeling of danger and almost in spite of ourselves, because we are faced with a pleasure mixed with chills.”
“Yes, my characters are psychopaths. Incurables
,” Highsmith accepted.
The touch of inspiration for Ripley came in 1952:
“I saw a person on the beach. It was six in the morning and a man was walking with an extremely worried, annoyed face. That man was completely alone. I was in my hotel, in Positano, and the room was very high. I never met the man, I just started imagining him, dreaming him
.”
The return to the sources
Zaillan said that, in his decision to film Ripley in black and white, he forgoed “returning to the sources.” Highsmith would have imagined Ripley would be filmed like this. Away from some “festive” tones of certain moments of the film, before the crimes accelerated the character's drift, the brand new series deepens the tone of intimacy, disturbance and even artistic searches. Charlie Parker's jazz does not predominate here, but Caravaggio's paintings appear, in a curious association of feelings.
The Irishman Andrew Scott is Ripley: an individual who goes from being a small-time scammer with even a hint of naivety, lost in the immensity of New York, to a cold manipulator and murderer on the Italian coast. The story focuses on Atrani, a town neighboring Naples, with its narrow streets, the immensity of the sea and typical characters.
Also its arches and its palaces. Johnny Flynn as Dickie Greenleaf - the son of rich people with painter pretensions - and Dakota Fanning as his muse Marge - the first to suspect Ripley's intentions - are the other protagonists along with the singer Eliot Sumner, daughter of Sting, as Freddy Thousands. Here, another of the director's discoveries, dressing as androgynous the same Miles that Phillipe Seymour-Hoffman played in the film.
On the path of Caravaggio
Caravaggio's works appear in several of Ripley's episodes, for example from the Oratorio de San Lorenzo, which he visits in Palermo. In another episode, the psychopath arrives at the Borghese Gallery in Rome, and the guide explains to him the famous painting “David with the Head of Goliath”: “Caravaggio portrays David as a compassionate, even loving man, in the way in which he looks at the severed head of Goliath. The painter further strengthened this bond by using himself as a model for the two. “They are both the face of Caravaggio.”
Ripley had already had her acquaintance with Caravaggio in Naples, taken by the unfortunate Dick at the beginning of the relationship. Caravaggio lived for a time in Naples, then the territory of the Spanish crown, while he was on the run after being accused of a crime and sentenced to death. But that stage marked him deeply, he was protected by the powerful. He painted a dozen paintings, including the “Seven Works of Mercy” that can still be admired in the church of Pío Monte. According to experts such as Sylvain Bellenger “In the 18 months that Caravaggio was in Naples, the Neapolitan school changed as if a century had passed.” Fundamental artist of the Baroque, he died in Porto Ercolano on July 18, 1610 at the age of 38, while returning to Rome.
Caravaggio wandered through Italy, persecuted, more than four centuries ago. But his life was defined by powerful works of art. Ripley, a novel and movie character, also flees through Italy, but the expression of his demons is violence, lies and fraud.