René Clément (1960)

The Talented Mr Ripley – the first half of it anyway – is Anthony Minghella’s best work but this earlier adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel is better.   To be fair to Minghella, though, not the least of the fascinations of René Clément’s version (the usual English title is Purple Noon) comes from comparing it with the 1999 remake.   Why is the Clément movie superior?   First, he and his co-writer Paul Gégauff limn the callous hedonism of Tom Ripley and Philippe (as he’s renamed here) Greenleaf more casually but more incisively than Minghella – in the young men’s joking treatment of a blind beggar on the streets of Rome, in Philippe’s cruelty when he banishes Tom from his yacht to a dinghy to burn for hours in the blazing heat.   Second, Clément substantiates this kinship between the pair by making them physically two of a kind:  Alain Delon (Tom) and Maurice Ronet (Philippe) are made to look remarkably similar, given that the actors don’t particularly resemble each other.  Because Matt Damon doesn’t look anything like Jude Law, Tom Ripley’s impersonation of Dickie Greenleaf in Minghella’s version is absorbing as an act of will but the implications of resemblance in this adaptation are richer.   The same goes for the homosocial-homosexual aspects of Plein soleil.  Minghella expressed these more explicitly in Dickie’s bathroom and in the jealousy that brought about his murder.  Here they are less stressed but form a more expressive, prevailing texture.   And while the idea of Tom’s killing Philippe is discussed coolly and hypothetically between the two of them, the crime happens suddenly, unexpectedly, briefly.

The print I saw at BFI obviously hadn’t aged well but because the vividness of Henri Decaë’s palette still (literally) shone through, it actually served to heighten your sense of how dazzling the original must have been.  The breeziness of Nino Rota’s score captures the amorality of the protagonist.  (There’s no music during the key sequences out at sea, as if to suggest that the main characters are confronting each other there without the masks they wear in the presence of other people in social settings.)  Alain Delon, whose first major role this was, conveys Tom Ripley’s lack of conscience perfectly:  Tom is seldom stressed – he gets on with doing what he needs to do to further his ends.   If he stops to think, it’s a calculation of his next move, never a reflection on his criminal behaviour.  While Delon and Ronet are in a different class from Matt Damon and Jude Law, other members of the Minghella cast compare very favourably with their precursors in Plein soleil.  As Freddy Miles, Bill Kearns isn’t a patch on Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Although the character is different anyway (a woman in the ballet world here), Ave Ninchi’s Signora Gianna corresponds in the scheme of the story to the Cate Blanchett role in The Talented Mr Ripley and Blanchett wins hands down.  Marie Laforet eventually develops an arresting aura of misery as Marge but Gwyneth Paltrow is much more various.

Like The Talented Mr Ripley, Plein soleil goes on a bit too long.  Unlike the Minghella film (and the Patricia Highsmith novel), it ends with Tom about to get his comeuppance.  The ending comes both as a surprise and a letdown and it may signal a failure of nerve on Rene Clément’s part – a fear that allowing the cold-blooded killer to prosper would be unacceptable to audiences.  But the sense of anti-climax you experience has a strong point too:  it makes you realise how complicit with Alain Delon’s psychopathic charmer you’ve become in the course of the film.

16 September 2010