The Talented Mr Ripley

Saw The Talented Mr Ripley, a film that opens on the titular Ripley regretting everything.  He is a piano player who happens to be in the right place at the right time.  He's mistaken for the friend of a wayward son of some rich family and is sent off to Italy to collect his "friend." In Italy he meets up with the rich son and befriends him and his lovely fiance who are idling their days away on the Italian beaches.

But Tom is not as he seems.  He shows off a talent for impersonation, for forgery.  He watches the rich son in a polite, but fixated way, creepily fascinated and enraptured.  He lies to a rich woman that he runs into that he is the rich son.  As the film progresses, this homoerotic subtext is drawn out into light, Tom's feelings for the rich son becoming clear.  Tom becomes a sort of covetous changeling: becoming what he desires, personifying it, seeking to replace it with himself.

As Tom's double-life spirals from harmless but inappropriate imposture into outright impersonation and fraud, the film tightens in on him.  The world of the rich is a small world and his lies mount higher and higher as he must remember who he is to different people and what lies he last left them with.  In a final cruel irony of the film, it is shown that his lies which gained him access to world of the rich have also closed the door on his true happiness.

I liked the film.  It's a good, taught, psychodrama.  The film is set in the 50s, when to be gay was to live a double-life Tom takes this one step further and uses his skills at imitation and sublimation to gain not only the semblance of a heterosexual life but a comfortable one too.  The film is a little too frothy to be really great, I feel.  It's going for an ever-more-tense, Hitchcockian mood, or trying for an obsessive, Fincherish vibe, but it never quite gets there.  Very interesting nonetheless however and well worth the watch.

Also: this film is based on the Ripley novels by Patricia Highsmith, a bisexual woman who also wrote The Price of Salt by the way.  There's another adaptation of this Ripley novel called Purple Noon starring Alain Delon who I think is one of the most beautiful people to have existed.  Expect a review of that some day.