The Different Guises of Tom Ripley

I have been a fan of Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr Ripley for a few years now, partly down to the surprise at Minghella making a film worth talking about but mostly because of Matt Damon's portrayal. I had always been aware of Rene Clement's Plein Soleil (1960), the first and some say best adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's novel. I read the novel a few months ago and finally got round to seeing Plein Soleil the other day.



The verdict? Interesting, very interesting. Whilst Minghella's version pretty much recounts the plot of the novel (with a little added gay subtext), Clement takes a rather more circuitous route. Plein Soleil begins somewhere halfway through the novel and never gives you what's happened previously as some sort of backstory. So we don't see Dickie (here renamed Phillipe) Greenleaf's father sending Ripley (played by the almost over-poweringly beautiful Alain Delon) to Europe to find him and we don't see Tom ingratiate himself into Dickie's life. This doesn't harm the film. Perhaps the lack of introspection and the wall placed between Tom and audience does. As someone on the net has noted, Delon's Ripley is far more impulsive than Damon's. There is far less thought, far less planning, far less time alone with Ripley. He remains an enigma. Perhaps that's a good thing, but maybe not.



There is a strange atmosphere to Plein Soleil. Part of it comes from the strange conflagration of Americans and French. Tom Ripley is called Tom Ripley, he talks about "going back to San Francisco" but he is played by a Frenchman speaking French. Dickie Greenleaf is renamed Phillipe Greenleaf and yet his family live in San Francisco. There is no confirmation of their nationality. Meanwhile, Freddy Miles has an American name but speaks French but with an American accent. It is all very confusing.

But there is something to Delon's Ripley that is not present in Damon's: sexuality. Not many people would argue who is the more beautiful of the two men, but Clement adds to Delon's obvious attractiveness by sending his camera fawning over him at every opportunity. Elsewhere on the net I have seen the film described as the (producers) "Hakim Brother's homage to Alain Delon's crotch". That reviewer has a point. There is certain magnetism to Delon that helps drive the Ripley character. What the "French James Dean" lacks is darkness. He smiles too much basically. He doesn't have the darkness in his eyes that Damon's version has. Damon's demonstration of Ripley's talent for mockery in Minghella's film is riveting. It scares us as much as it does Jude Law's Greenleaf. There is no such scene in Plein Soleil. Damon plays Ripley as driven and maniacal. His charm is icy, Delon's is as hot as the sun.

I suppose both films miss out on parts of Ripley. Delon's is more magnetic, more attractive, but Damon's is darker and more pathetic. This is perhaps a testament to Highsmith's creation. It is far too complex to capture in one go.

Watch both the films and read the novel(s). Somewhere in between you may well find the real Ripley. But don't expect too much, Ripley is always just out of reach.

Forgotten films

I have been watching a lot of films recently and have forgotten (or been too lazy) to write about them. I shall however write about one in detail in a following post. This post shall be a quick resume of the films I've seen.

Roger Dodger
dir. Dylan Kidd
2002

Very, very well written story of a cynical ad man (Campbell Scott) giving his geeky, teenage nephew Nick (Jesse Eisenberg, who you may remember as the older brother in the excellent The Squid And The Whale) a crash course in seduction one night in Manhattan. It's a fantastically observed tale of awakening, both teenage and adult, with marvellous performances by Scott and Eisenberg.

American Splendour
dirs. Shari Springer Berman & Robert Pulcini
2003

Yes I know I'm a bit late with this one, and I can't really add much to what's already been written. Very inventive for the first hour or so before falling back into more familiar biopic formulas, although carried through by the remarkable performance by Paul Giamatti.

The World Of Henry Orient

I rented this delightful film after seeing it on The Onion's Sixteen Films That May Have Influenced Wes [Anderson's] Style list. I felt somewhat smug in being able to boast having seen a couple more than the person here!

Needless to say I hadn't seen all of them, and this was the first one to peak my interest. Made in 1964 it seems to anticipate a lot of the social change that was just around the corner, but whilst being wholeheartedly NOT a film with a message. It's a light, comic film (it stars Peter Sellers after all) about adolescent crushes.

Two girls at a prestigious New York school fall in love with Sellers' hilarious avant-garde composer (who needs prompting by his lugubrious conductor for the next note) and begin to compose an imaginary love affair, complete with love letters and trips to foreign locations. Punning on his name, they sit outside his apartment with Chinese hats on and bow, hands clasped every time they catch sight of him. Orient is seriously perturbed by these pesky kids because he is in the process of trying to entice an extremely nervous married woman into his apartment for all sorts of shenanigans. (It will not spoil the film to say that when he does finally get her inside, it produces a very funny scene).

What struck me about this film was its streak of progressive social politics. The sad, dreamy Gil lives with her divorced mother and her "old friend" and fellow divorcee. All three bond with Gil's impulsive (and quite possibly unhinged) new friend Val over their shared experiences of psychiatrists. It boasts an understanding of adolescent love and female friendship very few films made today exhibit, a tolerance of pre-pubescent imaginary love affairs as the harmless playacting they are and a realisation of their importance in maturity: Gil's mother and friend get quite teary remembering their own first crushes, and Gil's mother notes drily "now the real trouble starts" before a cut to the girls a couple of years later applying makeup and talking about boys at school.

The performances of the two newcomers Tippy Walker as Val and Merrie Spaeth's Gil are superbly natural, wonderfully ignorant of the camera. They are not the children so often seen in movies, pale, over-sentimentalised, exagerrated versions. Their friendship blossoms before your very eyes and the sadness that underpins their relationship perfectly judged: never over-bearing but always in your mind. Sellers' performance is as always entirely manic, yet wholly hilarious.

And in case you were wondering, it is SO Wes Anderson. Beautiful photography (New York in the crisp, clear sunlight of an autumn day), adrift young offspring of rich families, an undercurrent of sadness and broken homes, eccentric adults. This really is a wonderful film.

Creating an atmosphere...

Whenever I spend a long period of time on a piece of writing over the course of a few months, I always find myself listening to certain songs and pieces of music over and over again. They create a soundtrack not necessarily to the work itself but to my writing of it. When I was at university and making my third and debatably most successful attempt at a novel (last time I checked it, it was forty or so pages and some of it wasn't that bad) the soundtrack was Interpol's first album "Turn On The Bright Lights". I don't know what came first, the writing or the music, but soon enough both were inseperable. The content of my novel seemed to fit perfectly the atmosphere of the album.

I've been working on this soulmates-themed film now for seven months or so. As I was sitting down to write this evening I thought I'd take a look at the playlist I've gradually accrued over the last half a year. Some of them seemed strange choices and when played seemed to be sounds from another era, when the film was something else entirely. Those were swiftly deleted. Others appeared to have cemented their place in my mind and in the film. The LCD Soundsystem track "All My Friends" seems now a classic evocation of parts of the script, and when I hear Som Tres' jolly "Homenagem A Mongo" it conjures up a crystal-clear image in my head of one of the club scenes. I can even see the characters dancing to it, each one dancing differently, for all the world as if they were actual, living people.

I've read about this before. A writer, a famous one (I can't remember her name, but I seem to remember it was a woman), wrote of similar feelings. In her case, it was a particular album that seeped into the writing of her novel (I think it was a novel) and its tempo, the rythmn, the way the singer delivered the words all found their way into the novel in the guise of style and even word choice. Something completely unintended and apparently unrealised until the final drafting. I suppose it's unremarkable in the sense that the music you listen to forms part of the fabric of your life, and that is all writers have to put into their work. But on the other hand, its an incredibly mysterious thing, perhaps unexplainable.

The Darjeeling Limited

Well I've seen it twice in three days so I obviously like it. I knew deep down I would. I did however share the suspicion of others that Wes Anderson's style would have become trying by now. That was the reaction of the people I saw it with, but as emphatically NOT my reaction as was possible. This film is so much more mature, more emotionally effecting than his others. As Dave at work said, "if you've got a brother, it's pretty much got you". That combined with all the signature stylistic flourishes that made us love Anderson in the first place makes The Darjeeling Limited perhaps his most successful film.



From the first moments of the preceding short film Hotel Chevalier we know we are to expect more from this film. That the end of a love affair is played out through Anderson's trademark slowmos and 60s pop heightens the emotion. As Natalie Portman's unnamed "ex-girlfriend" turns to Jason Schwartzman's lost Jack and says "what the fuck is going on?" the sense of frustration and sadness is unmistakable. Jack's emotionless stare is equally effecting.



The film proper benefits massively from Adrien Brody's prescence as the reluctant father-to-be Peter. Brody's ability to convey great worry in the slightest tremble of a lip or a forced smile works perfectly with Schwartzman's lost puppy dog eyes and Owen Wilson's repression of grief behind obsessive itinerary-making as Francis. That they look nothing like each other is of no consequence. These guys are the Whitman brothers, and they really are trying to make better lives for themselves however pathetically misguided they may be. Their desire is etched in the way Francis gets them to agree on making this a spirital quest, a life-changing experience. Of course finding oneself to a timetable typed up and laminated by a man called Brendan suffering from alopecia is unlikely to succeed. But their determination is touching. There is no sense of that "poor little rich kid" element that some people - unfairly - try to put onto Anderson.

The real difference is the sequence in a country village. Arriving at the village after only managing to save two of three drowing brothers they are welcomed, comforted and thanked in a nearly dialogue-less set of scenes that mark - in my opinion - a real step up for Anderson. The slowmos stop, the music stops, dialogue stops. Everything quietens down. Their spiritual quest seems to be bearing fruit. They begin to trust each other. They value each other.



I don't want to appear to be denigrating those classic Anderson traits of the slowmo and pop soundtrack. I went straight home and downloaded them! Whilst some people may have found them tiresome in this film, I felt they were used smartly and that they are taken out in the saddest moments of the film heightens their effect. They always come at moments the viewer needs for contemplation.

This film looks and sounds great and the acting comes from a finely-judged balance of humour and sadness. Of course it may be a touch sentimental, a little over-romantic but to accuse Anderson of un-realism is like accusing David Lynch of weirdness. As my friend Al said on coming out of the film, "it's a film I want to live in".

As a footnote, my lecturers warned against writing about things you love. I am afraid I have not heeded their advice on this occasion. Apologies. In depth reviewing will follow.

F For Fake

Made in 1974, and his last completed film, Orson Welles' F For Fake is the sign-off from a master. In control of the viewer from the first frame to the last, Welles as self-confessed "charlatan" weaves together a tale of fakery, forgery and film-making. A re-edited documentary about "the greatest art forger of the twentieth century" Elmyr de Hory turns into an interrogation of his 'outer', the author of of a fake biography of Howard Hughes Clifford Irving which turns into a history of Hughes and a history of Welles himself and a connection with a girl, a girl who set up a grand fake, a fake that is possibly fake. A fake fake.

F For Fake is alive with the lightness of touch of the French New Wave, the playfulness, the knowingness, the lack of seriousness and the conviction that "in a sense, each story is a sort of lie". It also features what's been called "the most profound moment in cinema history", a rumination on artistic signatures set amongst the mist swirling around the unclaimed Chartres cathedral:



Of course Welles is the perfect narrator of this story within a story within a story... As he himself owns up to (the whole truth?), he has a history of fakery himself, beginning in Ireland, at the age of 16 when he managed to convince members of a repertory theatre in Dublin that he was in fact a famous American actor. Of course he was soon to become just that, by way of one of the great hoaxes of the twentieth century, never mind Elmyr! Welles's great War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938 that sent thousands into mass hysteria. Or did it? Uncertainty is everywhere in this film, round every corner, in every frame, in every utterance. It would be good to remember that hall of mirrors sequence from The Lady From Shanghai. It might do you some good.

It says something about Welles' genius that he can laugh raucously at the absurdity of the rabbit hole of confusion and forgery surrounding Elmyr, Irving and himself one minute and compose the Chartres ode the next. Perhaps they're not that different. Perhaps that's the real sign of genius, the realisation that life, as a friend of mine once said, is "far to serious to be taken seriously".

Blow Out

I came across Brian de Palma's Blow Out from 1981 on a search for a key list of those great American political conspiracy thrillers that dominated the 1970s. Whilst obviously not fulfilling one of those descriptions (and debatably a couple of the others), it surely must be placed with All The President's Men and The Conversation if only for contextual reasons.

That it is a minor addition to the list is not a controversial statement. It doesn't have nearly the clarity of vision or the tautness of either Pakula's or Coppola's film. The viewer is never convinced of the depth or importance of the conspiracy John Travolta's Jack Terry is trying to uncover. It seems coincidental somehow, unimportant. Perhaps this is because the film never seems to know what it wants to be. It flits self-consciously between near-light romantic comedy and real political thriller. It reminded me of Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle romancing Betsy whilst shooting pimps and drug lords. And yet it didn't work in the way Scorsese's picture so obviously does.

This lack of certainty is reflected in the confused camera work. There is a great moment when Jack discovers all his tapes have been erased and the camera continues a dizzying circle around his office over an hour as Jack searches his office, leaves it, comes back, answers the phone and leaves again, but there is a terrible slow-motion climax as he runs to save Sally to the backdrop of fireworks and the celebrations of Liberty Day.

Much has been written about de Palma's Hitchcock fixation and his attempt at a Master of Suspense-style climax falls rather flat. But it is in this failure that the film is at its bravest. De Palma does something Hitchcock would never have done: have the hero fail. I won't spoil it by going into detail, but suffice it to say, the one moment of invention in this film is in the climax. Best place for it if you ask me.

More than expected...

Sometimes it's good to take stock. On opening the various scenes of our ever-changing script, I began to get a little confused. We have two realities to play with and it was becoming increasingly uncertain where and when we were switching. Whilst that can be an effect created for the viewer, if the writer shares the same confusion then it's generally a bad sign. I always try to keep hold of the near-maxim: The writer needs to know everything about every character at every minute.

To make more sense of it, I put all the scenes together (we have three "Parts" and each Part has numbers, so we have Part I - 1 but also Part I - 1 - 1) in their logical order and to my surprise discovered (a) it makes far more sense than I thought it would and (b) we have a third of the film. It made me think that we are actually getting somewhere. Every time me and my writing partner Tobias talk, we come up with more ideas, stripping away excess scenes, dialogue, ideas and coming up with newer, more streamlined ones.

Sometimes the end seems to be getting further away, but there's always something to spur you on. Confidence is one, I really think we can come up with a good script and make a good film from it. Excitement is another. We talked at the weekend and tackled the problems posed by the confusion detailed above. In simultaneously making it more rigid and flowing, I think we've achieved some sort of balance and hopefully the structural problems are more behind us than in front of us.

Metropolitan

I saw Whit Stillman's Metropolitan last night. Described as a "great afternoon film" by my friend Al, it is simply a great film. Not great in the grand scheme of things perhaps, but great nonetheless.



The tone is perfect. It manages to balance the arch dialogue ("I'm a committed Socialist yes but not a Marxist. I prefer the socialist model developed by the 19th century socialist critic Fourier") and intentionally mannered acting with a wonderful deftness. It helps that there is a constant stream of funny one-liners ("playing strip poker with an exhibitionist somehow takes the challenge out of it"), largely delivered by Chris Eigeman's Nick Smith. It has a consistency to it, the lines don't sound contrived even though they are.

It is like a cross between Woody Allen's films and JD Salinger's short stories. Metropolitan is as quintessentially New York as both Allen and Salinger, the characters in this film as firmly rooted in the Big Apple as Alvy Singer or Zooey Glass. It's part of the film's allure, that it presents us with this classic image of New York, New York at Christmas, New York's rich young things, great parties, balls, debutantes. It's a cinematic box of expensive chocolates; a wilful ignorance of the "real" New York that no-one wants to see and gives us our dream New York, the city we all want to be rich and young in.

I Don't Want To Sleep Alone

One of the trailers before Paranoid Park was this from Tsai Ming Liang.

I'd never heard of him before I saw this, but from the first second I was captivated. It looks absolutely like nothing I've seen before.

Paranoid Park

Well I did indeed see Paranoid Park.

It seemed more unreal than previous films in a similar vein like Last Days and Elephant. Whilst it continued the tracking shots of people walking and the jigsaw-puzzle narrative that were seen in those films, it added an extra dimension to take one out of the immediate situation. Music nodded to something else, something that wasn't at first obvious. This continued throughout the film. There was always something else to think about, what you were watching wasn't the whole story.

Within in the first few minutes, Alex's narration is abandoned for dreamlike, nearly elegiac camcordered shots of the Paranoid Park skaters. The camera dips and rises with the skaters, moving about at will to the accompaniment of music made from understated French vocals and lo-fi instrumentation. These shots, if not always with the same music, reappear throughout the film, as if a reminder of the purity of skateboarding in Alex's confused and now impure world.

This is a film with multiple narratives, but you wouldn't really say that. It doesn't set them up in the way cineastes expect these days, with the film-maker flitting between the separate strands before bringing them all together at the end. In Paranoid Park they are always just there. Van Sant doesn't make you forget this. Ignore context at your peril.

Van Sant should be, and pretty much is, "down with the kids" now. In his search of Portland for the right kid to play Alex, he's unearthed a performance from Gabe Nevins that captures note perfect those elements of inscrutability, uncertainty and a-shrug-of-the-shoulder insouciance that is - for adults at least - the life of the teenager. It would feel almost like a documentary at times, if it wasn't for the stylised imagery. There is a perfect understatedness to it all. As Alex is being questioned by the police, we don't get histrionic beads of sweat or nervous fingers drumming the table. Alex is relaxed, and only a little change of his story makes anything seem amiss.

There's something about this film I can't quite put my finger on, which I suppose is apt. That's exactly the feeling you have coming out of the cinema. All these little moments that somehow have added up to something much bigger. And yet they're still identifiable as small moments - a shower, a conversation at a skate park, each one is something and nothing. What Gus Van Sant manages here I suppose is to make you aware of the big moments encased in small ones, but to never let you forget that casing. The two exist in parallel.

Work and Non-Work

The other day I put into practice that theory (is it really a theory?) of continuing to write even when you know it's shit. I think it worked out pretty well, but it will obviously need retouching. It'll probably change completely by the time we film it. I'd be worried if it didn't, to be honest. A script is never a completed film.

Nevertheless, all that success was mitigated by my failure to upload the scene to our Partnerpage, thus preventing me from working on it for the next week. Which is highly frustrating.

Still, it's given me something to write about on here.

And I'm going to see Paranoid Park later.

Could be worse.

Handsworth Songs

Today at Document, I saw Handsworth Songs, a film made in 1985/6 by the Black Audio Film Collective about what have come to be known as "race riots" in Birmingham and London.

In introducing the film, director John Akomfrah talked of an idea he and fellow members of the Collective came into contact with during their time at art college, that of the cultural theorist Antonio Gramsci, who talked of political crises as simultaneously crises of narrative, of a failure to tell a story (or the real story? this was unclear) of events that were taking place. As I took it, each failure informed the other to the extent that they were inseperable and led to further crises and unrest.

The film itself, whilst ostensibly focussing on the Handsworth riots deals with the entire legacy of migrant travel to Britain, and Windrush in particular. It tries to unpick the long and complicated story that led to the riots. Akomfrah talked in praise of the collage technique and the film uses collage (and I suppose by extension Eisenstein's practice of montage) to gather in all the threads of the Afro-Carribean experience in Britain up until that point.

In quickly scribbled notes during the Q&A afterwards I wrote down "attempt to intervene in status quo narrative", that being the generalised, establishment-accepted version of events which had to all intents and purposes been 'agreed' on in the time between the making and the screening of the film. In fact Akomfrah told of an article by Salman Rushdie attacking the film for restricting the voices of Handsworth's inhabitants. By attempting to tell their own story, to contrast the "official" line, the Collective had been equally as guilty of denying the voiceless a voice.

I'm not sure how much I agree with that. What Akomfrah talked about were the distinctions, similarities and interplay between history and memory. Whilst obviously contentious, the Collective's aim he said was to mingle the two in the tradition of the black poetry he was reading at the time. Not a faceoff but a friendly meeting between the public and the personal, perhaps an attempt to bridge a gap.

Up to a point it succeeds. It is a gathering in of footage from libraries, footage discarded by mainstream TV channels, the films of Phillip Donnellan and that from the public. This latter category includes some fantastic coverage of Malcolm X wandering around Smethwick.

I felt lucky to see this film in the prescence of its very articulate director. By rounding out and elaborating on a film full of allusions, songs and words that meant more than their immediate literal meaning I felt I grasped a huge part of what the Black Audio Film Collective were all about, what the riots were about and crucially what life in Britain was like during the 80s, not just for immigrants and their families but for all of us.

Decisions, decisions

Writing is always about decisions. To take anything forward, you have to decide one way or another. There's never a middle road. And if there is, it only seems like one for a while until you realise it's one of the forks.

I usually shy way from the decisions, to be honest. Perhaps that's why I struggle to finish things. Come up against even a relatively simple decision like "does this character like or dislike that person" and I run away. I'm learning, slowly but surely, to blast through the walls, even to ignore the need for a decision if I have to and just KEEP WRITING. As Hemingway once said, "the first draft of anything is shit" and you don't have anything to de-shit if there's nowt on t' page.

Children of Solidarnosc

Lack of work on my part this week. Mainly due to overwork at the day job and volunteering at the Document Human Rights Film Festival at the CCA.

I did projection of two films tonight! One called Beslan: The Right To Live, which was a rather muddled film about the aftermath of the terrorist takeover of a school in the town of Beslan in southern Russia, and a fantastic film called Children of Solidarnosc.

The latter was a wonderfully assured, confident, incisive, thought-provoking (I could go on) piece following the children of leaders of the Solidarity movement in Poland. It was a cross sectional view of modern Poland. It talked to a young teacher whose father wrote a wonderfully tender song for her when she was one, explaining why her dad was away all the time and how he hoped to bring about a better world for his little girl. The song became an anthem for the workers but had less impact at home, and she admits feeling bitterness towards her father. In a discussion round the dinner table she talks of the struggles for her generation in a capitalist society. Her parents are a little sceptical, listing the freedoms young people now enjoy. She finds life just as hard she says. At home she and her boyfriend bone up on Ireland whilst packing their possessions into boxes. They plan to live and work there for a few years in an attempt to save up money. "This is our last chance before we have children," they say.

We also met Lukasz, a media analyst in Warsaw who heads home every two weeks to his mother's farm and his 8 brothers and sisters. He worries about what will happen to the farm and his mother, and seems to find the balance between his two lives a hard one to achieve. He says people are leaving Poland and he himself went to the US and England, but "this is where my life is".

Artur, meanwhile, has met a girl named Ana and they are busy planning and building (!!!) their house. He works in the same shipyards his father did and whilst he seems a cheery fellow he moans at the unfair ratio of responsibility to salary.

All of the young people in this film share the problems most young people in the West have. Jobs, money, family, the usual stuff. What sets them apart is the acute realisation they all have that it could've been different, and was for their parents. The one problem they have that Westerners don't is to reconcile the legacy of communism and their parents part in its downfall with their new lives.

Welcome

This is a test. It's also the first entry in a blog that theoretically will become dedicated to projects undertaken by Mind Mechanics.