Last time around, I gasped at author Patricia Highsmith’s perversions and predilection for darkness. As promised, I return with thoughts on the Netflix adaptation of one of her most famous creations.
Director and writer Steven Zaillian (alongside DoP Robert Elswit) has reframed Thomas Ripley as a more distant, shadowy and impassive conman than we might remember him in the glamorous The Talented Mr Ripley.
That’s not to say he doesn’t ruminate or what he’s done, as his hallucinations illustrate. But he’s more of a cold killer than Matt Damon’s impulsive and troubled soul. But not a natural-born killer, in Scott’s eyes. “He’s not bloodthirsty,” he told Variety. “He’s invited into this world, he doesn’t seek it out. And then the darkness within him emerges.”
Instead of being this loner and outsider who so desperately wants to belong, who “would rather be a fake somebody than a real nobody”, Andrew Scott plays him as someone who is even more cunning and fastidious. Closer to Alain Delon in Réne Clément’s Plein Soleil but almost charmless.
Read more in Bluejeans & Moonbeams.
Also in this issue: rejection letters from Toni Morrison, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, how synths and drum machines revolutionised R&B, the photography and politics of Tyneside’s Tish Murtha and the day that Prince left.