Bonus: the Netflix Ripley.
I can’t find it now, but there’s a meme with an old newspaper clipping of a boy who’d gone missing for a week and it turned out he’d just parked himself in a movie theater with some candy. I don’t know what the kid was going through, but when I have stuff in my mind to sort out I tend to let cinema do it for me.
Of late:
I quite liked Haley Elizabeth Anderson’s Tendaberry (2024), a Southern Brooklyn city symphony of losing, keeping, discovering, dancing. Its openness reminds me of the pre-1993ish lower-budget indie landscape, when everything mattered less but still meant the world. And I quite liked Mariam Chachia and Nik Voigt’s Magic Mountain (Georgia/Poland, 2023), a documentary set in the rolling fog of a tuberculosis sanitorium in its last days). Of Magic Mountain, I certainly admired the goth baked into it and the Thomas Mann echoes, but I also weirdly envied the social bonds of the patients’ communal living arrangement in an ever-isolating contemporary society. Both screened as part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look series.
And at MoMI on Good Friday, I revisited Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988); a fascinating watch that’s both high camp and sincerely polemical, with Scorsese as sword-and-sandal pomp melodramatist whose cynicism w/r/t humanity is an umbilical cord he can’t snip from a love of humanity, and screenwriter Paul Schrader as rugged transcendentalist with a Calvinist conservative streak and a cleanse-with-fire hard-on he’s harbored since at least Taxi Driver. Its audacious Judeo-Christian theological fanfic of a savior-or-is-he figure in beyond-the-pale psychological distress is on par with The End of Evangelion (1997, saw that on the big screen in March too, out on Long Island).
Down at the Anthology Film Archives, a series celebrating the British film journal Afterimage embarked with Jean-Luc Godard & Jean-Henri Roger’s kicky and multifaceted Marxist salvo British Sounds (See You at Mao) (1969), and the revolution continued at Metrograph with Peter Brook’s dazzlingly bananas Marat/Sade from 1967 (adapting Peter Weiss’s 1963 stageplay-within-a-stageplay in which the Marquis de Sade of 1808 uses a cast of his fellow loony-bin inmates and a few gallons of mime makeup to recollect the leftist internecine squabbles and working-class revanchism of eighteenth-century France).
I didn’t hold out a ton of hope that Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding (2024) would be good, and it kinda wasn’t, but on a Wednesday afternoon at BAM it was an intermittently okay trashy genre exercise. Style on its own can’t hold a full narrative feature together, but in the main I’m bullish on pulp and grime as grammar.
Which I had in mind when I was watching Ripley (2024) on Netflix. It looks gorgeous. It looks too gorgeous. Robert Elswit is one of my favorite living cinematographers, but that’s on the strength of the malfeasant sick-greens of Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler (2014) and the ineffable PTA-ness Elswit brings out in his PTA movies. I understand the impulse to differentiate the visual palette of this Talented Mr. Ripley adaptation from the boat shoes and peach-fuzz ease of Minghella’s 1999 one or the depraved ceruleans of René Clément’s Purple Noon (1960), and yet Elswit could have made a whole death-row meal of the Purple Noon sensibility (pulp, grime, a whiff of smut and snuff and the unspeakable). It’s so his wheelhouse.
And I don’t have to tell you that monochrome has made plenty of swell mysteries! But the diligent shot composition and Relentlessly! Sumptuous! Lighting Design! in Ripley are a mismatch for the charmless flopsweat hustle of the Tom Ripley character as played with gusto by Andrew Scott. Elswit here more or less begs the Academy and the critic pool for comparison to Hitchcock’s staircase shots, the Italian Neorealists (minus any real sign of the movement’s class consciousness), the chiaroscuro of German Expressionist/noir crossover, Robert Krasker’s lensing on The Third Man. It’s overkill; I craved moments of banality. And the editing, by David Rogers and Joshua Raymond Lee, is too modern and workaday Netflix-vibes, and it all just clashes.
The three major Talented Mr. Ripley retellings are quality for sure, and yet only the Clément one is willing to meet Tom Ripley where he truly lives, inside his shitty little heart. If Elswit, director Steven Zaillian, and the editors follow the emerging art-crime thread and continue on with further Highsmithery, perhaps they’ll take the correct lessons from Wim Wenders and Robby Müller on The American Friend and soak season 2’s point of view in the 1977 film’s oleaginous lowlife ooze.
