No end to Tom Ripley - so a revisit to John Baxter's thoughts on John Malkovich's impersonation - RIPLEY'S GAME (Liliana Cavani, 2002)

Three Ripleys - Andrew Scott, Matt Damon, John Malkovich

As fast as we thought the only remaining possible iteration of Tom Ripley and his talents might be a musical, perhaps in the late Sondheim fashion where sets are mostly bare and we just have the words and music, (though dont hold our collective breath. As far as I know we are still waiting on a production of the great man's Passion, his brilliant version of Ettore Scola's wonderful movie Passione d'Amore..but I digress....)

But no there's yet another iteration, this time by the Birmingham Rep (I'm not joking)...you can find The Guardian's review here.

It prompted John Baxter to suggest prolonging this attention by republishing his note on RIPLEY'S GAME (Liliana Cavani [and John Malkovich uncredited], 2002)

If one experiences a twinge of alarm at the occasional sight of John Malkovich solemnly pedalling his old-fashioned upright bicycle down Boulevard St. Germain, it’s attributable to his performance in this little-known contribution to the growing mythos surrounding Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley.

 

The story develops so naturally that only in retrospect does its implicit nihilism become apparent. Ripley is enjoying the luxury of a Palladian villa in rural Italy and a sleek wife (Chiara Caselli) who is also a harpsichord virtuoso, when a local expat, Jonathan Trevanny (Dougray Scott), casually insults him at a party.

 

Ripley discovers that Trevanny is dying from leukemia and needs money to provide for his wife and child, so when Reeves, his former partner in crime (a marvellously vulgar Ray Winstone) needs someone killed, Ripley, mostly, it seems, to amuse himself, proposes Trevanny for the job and nudges him into taking it.

 

Thereafter, the story speeds down corridors of carnage, with numerous low-lifes shot, garrotted, caught in mantraps and beaten to death with blunt objects. With each death, Trevanny becomes more comfortable with killing, and begins to look up to Ripley as his sensei : an instructor not only in murder but in the philosophy that underpins it.

 

To Ripley, who has no moral compass, the whole episode is another round in the game that is his life. When there’s nobody to kill, he gets on with his chores, pausing, for instance, in the middle of incinerating the morning’s harvest of corpses to call a florist and order peonies for his wife’s concert. This element is better captured in the film’s French title Ripley s’amuse : Ripley Amuses Himself or, more precisely, Ripley Has Some Fun.

 

However much there is to admire in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr.Ripley and René Clément’s Plein Soleil, aka Purple Noon, neither captures the sociopathic chill of Highsmith’s original. [I’m less familiar with Wim Wenders’ The American Friend and Roger Spottiswoode’s Ripley Underground.] 

 

Matt Damon is too much the upwardly mobile yuppie, impatient for his unearned rewards, and Alain Delon the mindless satyr, greedy for life. The way Delon dives below on the yacht where he had just murdered Maurice Ronet and returns to bite into a ripe peach as he takes the wheel says everything we need to know about his moral landscape.

As for Damon, he brings to mind Lucy in Peanuts and her petulant “All I want is what’s coming to me.” Neither offers any insight into the reasons behind their murders and lies. The acts justify themselves

 

Malkovich’s Ripley has arrived at a measured assessment of his nature, and that of the world in which he lives. When the innocent Trevanny asks how he can kill with such sang froid, Ripley replies “I lack your conscience - and when I was young that troubled me. It no longer does. I don’t worry about being caught because I don’t believe anyone is watching.”

 

Being so little involved allows him to toss off non sequiturs with faultless deadpan. Warning Trevanny of possible repercussions to his assassinations, he concedes thoughtfully that those seeking retribution will target him rather than Trevanny because “these Balkan types tend to take strangling quite personally,” and after garrotting two men in the toilet of the Berlin-Dusseldorf express and almost killing a third, he muses “It never used to be this crowded in first class.”

 

'....Ripley owes almost everything to Malkovich...."

Ripley’s want of guilt or scruple is implicit in his sideways glances in the midst of an act of violence, his way of pausing in the midst of a skirmish to run an appreciative finger down the curve of a thigh in a mural, and in the casual manner in which he imposes his will with a few evenly modulated words, tonelessly repeated.

 

When Trevanny sneers at a party that Ripley has “too much money and no taste” Ripley, expressionless, simply enquires “Meaning?” Trevanny offers a kind of explanation. Ripley repeats “Meaning?” and continues to do so until Trevanny flees the scene. Later, when Ripley’s wife, as they start to make love, asks how he intends to act in a certain situation, he says “Turn over and I’ll tell you,” and repeats the order until she surrenders with a contented sigh to the sure, if cruel, touch of a skilled handler.

 

Assigning credit for this chill and glittering exercise in amorality is not easy. Director Liliana Cavani co-wrote the screenplay with Charles McKeown, author of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, but clearly the complex portrait of Ripley owes almost everything to Malkovich. He also took over when Cavani left to direct an opera at La Scala, and is responsible for about a third of the completed film, which was never given a cinema release in North America and barely seen elsewhere.

 

Fortunately a 2004 DVD does justice to the wintry Italian landscapes and the silky, truffled luxury of Ripley’s existence. If life is indeed no more than a game, this is one of the most agreeable ways in which it can be played.

"So Frenchy, so chic, so so, so far..." Barrie Pattison is at the Alliance Francaise FRENCH FILM FESTIVAL 2024

Vincent Elbaz, Laure Calamy, Iris et les hommes/It's Raining Men

The French Film Festival, the 35^th we are told, is a mixed bag but not quite a dog’s breakfast,  if you are looking for a suitable cliché. Misjudged star vehicles share with accomplished professionalism and at least one spectacular blockbuster that can expect to find a place in movie history. 

Caroline Vignal’s Iris et les hommes/It's Raining Men has the Antoinette dans les Cévennes team try to repeat that feel-good success while being cutting edge and confronting at the same time but poor Laure Calamy’s genuine forty something charms have to carry a heavy load.

She comes on as a successful Parisian dentist with a so nice apartment, husband Vincent Elbaz and a couple of teenage daughters, however all is not well at bed time. Another mum at the daughter’s school alerts her to the Tinder site where married people, who want to play about, can hook up. Cell ‘phone jokes with Laure trying to photograph her butt or select from the awful head shots her dental nurse Suzanne De Baecque has made of her. The Metro carriage ride, where Laure imagines the fellow passengers speaking the texts her listing attracts works better than her getting erotic messages while she has a patient in the chair. The film can’t manage to keep these routines coming.

The bulk is her encounters with a variety of takers, meant to be funny – nervous Sylvain Katan proves a problem, Laurent Poitrenaux & Ismaël Sy Savané & Nicolas Godart make suitable partners but she didn’t pick up on the coded information from bondage enthusiast Alexandre Steiger and opts out as he’s fitting her leather gag. We get dental work timed to the “Man & a Woman” theme and, to tell us Laure is having a good time, they break out in a choreographed “It’s Raining Men” number with pedestrians joining in. That worked better first time round in the Bridget Jones movie.

Discussion of the polyamorous life style is would-be daring but we still end up hearing about the only game in town. Coming close on Drive-away Dolls embracing its own kinky morality, this is all on the sedate side. There’s a hint of the risks involved for Laure’s comfortable domestic life, in the way friends react to her new liberated personality and the humiliation to which she subjects her reserved daughter, but this is disturbingly marginal. We’ve done better in Sophie Marceau land.

What we get is really like a glossy sixties sex comedy, except the leads replace Doris Day and Rock Hudson, it’s Paris locations and not Hollywood sound stage, instead of gleaming Eastmancolor we have the current dim digital imaging and people do actually take their clothes off. I got bored with the prototype sixty years back and I got bored with this one.

 

John Malkovich, Fanny Ardant,
Complètement cramé/Well Done! /Mr. Blake at Your Service

Gilles Legardinier’s Complètement cramé/Well Done! Mr. Blake at Your Service is a problem. It’s a polished big budget A feature with name stars. … and it totally lacks conviction.

Listening to the opening commentary you suddenly realise that that’s being delivered in assured French by John Malkovich, quite eclipsing Erich Von Stroheim, Jean Seberg and the other Hollywood names who set up their tents there down the years. Malkovich is a British (!) businessman of the year, who embarrasses associate Al Ginter by not turning up to collect his award. Our hero treasures the memory of the chateau where he proposed to his one true love and the mother of his grown daughter. He jets off for a visitor stay he has booked there. However, things are not well in the so picturesque French countryside. Widowed chatelaine Fanny Ardent is not making a go of it and pins her hopes on striking it big on mail-in lottery coupons. Housekeeper Émilie Dequenne is taking guest bookings and advertising for staff to deal with them. Confusion lands John anonymous in the spot of butler, on a périod d’essaie trial.

Everyone has problems. Final demands litter Fanny’s desk. Emilie is hiding from a failed liaison with a Michelin-star chef and talking to her cat. Maid Eugénie Anselin is sleeping in the stables rather than tell her family the awful truth. Chess-playing gardener Philippe Bas, who takes a shot at John when he thinks he’s a burglar, pines for Émilie and has a curious relationship with the estate’s hedgehogs. He treats the videophone he and John repair as a confessionel.

It’s actually quite touching when they all sit down together to one of Émilie’s epicure meals, that we never get a good look at. John’s interventions have improved all their lives. I can’t help making an adverse comparison with the much funnier The Devil and Miss Jones, where their incognito rich guy Charles Coburn screws up all his attempts to help.

Then John falls off a ladder … and there’s a surreal robbery.

The revelation comes at the end when they run up a Xmas tree on the lawn and we realise that what we are watching is a ritzy version of one of those feel-good pieces that TV engulfs us with in the holiday season each year. By March its shortcomings are too obvious. The fact that the whole thing has been re-voiced in studio interior-sound French, though they all lip synch. impeccably, undermines any ambitions. 

 

Vincent Macaigne, Cecile De France, Bonnard: Pierre & Marthe

Art bio films – particularly the French examples - try to look like glossy paper coffee table books.  Martin Provost's Bonnard: Pierre & Marthe runs to some great images styled after post-impressionist art. An abandoned almond tree blooms and of course they get to devour a tempting roast fowl in the open air, even if the meal does end in a tantrum and the female leads shouting, up to their waists in the river, that contributes some of the film’s most appealing scenic elements. 

 

The times being what they are we concentrate on an overlooked female muse, think Isabelle Adjani as Camille Claudel or Christa Théret in Renoir. Prévost has been here before with his Seraphine. This one centers in an imposing performance from Cecile de France in big hats - skinny dipping, ageing decades, surviving the doctor’s prediction of her demise, getting to do a threesome with Vincent Macaigne’s Pierre Bonnard & Stacy Martin (Vox Lux) before she finds her own artistic vision. The always imposing De France gets our attention, if not all that much sympathy.

Macaigne’s Pierre Bonnard has more to work with making the artist a buffoonish juvenile who at least generates our curiosity – will he do the right thing? The plot asserts, with his involvement with fetching Martin, who figures as one of the film’s most striking images – the spectre in the bridal gown. The always admirable Anouk Grinberg gets some attention too. Otherwise it’s a parade of indistinct performers name dropping as characters are rowed to the leafy Bonnard home - Claude Monet, Maurice Ravel, José María Sert, Edouard Vuillard, Diaghilev, the cubists, les nabis. Idyllic rural life challenges the stimulation of the city. Though the film gives us close-ups of brush work and canvases shape in front of us, we learn perilously little about painting or the controversies of art. We do get to be reminded of the twentieth century with a glimpse of a developing photo or an authentic looking Edison cylinder to hint that there’s more going on.

This one manages to muster the shortcomings of its cycle in the usual unsatisfying manner, despite all the talent on show.

Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Ella Rumpf,
Le théorème de Marguerite/Marguerite's Theorem

I was beginning to think so Frenchy, so chic, so so so far. My luck however changed with Anna Novion’s Le théorème de Marguerite/Marguerite's Theorem. This one gets attention for its novelty even if we can find some familiar entertainment formulas lurking below the surface.

Severe twenty something Grad Student Ella Rumpf is on a fellowship at Paris’ prestigious École Normale Supérieure, tasked with solving the centuries-old math problem Szemerédi's theorem, under the unshaven supervision of Jean-Pierre Darroussin. Nice to know he’s still about. She feels threatened when Darroussin takes on another student, who turns out to be hunky Julien Frison. We know what to expect. After an original antagonism they’re going to work out their differences and she’s going to take off her glasses. However, when Rumpf is in the lecture theatre expounding her progress to date, Frison points out a fault in her calculations which invalidates all her work. Shattered, she flees the hall and abandons her project despite Darroussin’s objections, meaning she will have to refund the hefty sum advanced for her fellowship.

At this point it looks as if we are going to get a more interesting film about someone, who has been sheltered within the academic cocoon, having to face the reality of outside life. Rumpf gets thrown out of a cosmetics sales seminar for pointing out the flaw in the survey they are supposed to administer, with black girl Sonia Bonny already a walk-out after Rumpf demolished the training. Rumpf uses her cash in hand to buy into Bonny’s flat share and they start clubbing together after the day job selling sneakers at Ultimate Sport. However, Bonny uses the rent money to bankroll a dance course and it looks like Chinese landlord Xiaoxing Maurice Cheng will have them out on the street, until Rumpf proposes using her last three hundred and fifty francs to join the back room mahjong game she noticed, prompting her to study the game on her iPhone. Applying her maths know-how, she cleans up and Cheng sets her up as a pro gambler, solving her finance problems. We’ve been here with Robert Luketic’s 21 or even Donald O’Conor in Are You With It? Come to think of it, all this blackboard stuff (no computers and overhead projectors here) recalls the spacemen dazzling the academics in the versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still.

At this point, the film fleshes out the characters with Rumpf’s clumsy pick up of club patron Idir Azougli, background with her single-parent school teacher mother Clotilde Courau, Darroussin’s defence of pure mathematics, pointing out the research, that disclosed the world was round, changed human history, though we suspect his interest in Rumpf is to advance his own academic career, and the re-appearance of Frison, whose varsity brass band trombone is soon left outside Rumpf’s bedroom - about the time they start painting the flat walls black to do calculations.

Comes the major Lausanne conference, where Darroussin was to present their findings and Rumpf bowls up with the revelation of her turning the pyramid diagram upside down. Academics gather in the hall where the blackboard slides away to reveal another one underneath and she finally puts the square symbol at the end of her calculations to all round applause - nice ending where all the characters come good.

Novion, is an ex film student (Thesis “Anguish, Guilt and Despair in Bergman's oeuvre"), who is a couple of features into a career where she’s worked regularly with Darroussin. She creates a lively, populated ambience and gets strong performances. Newcomer Bonny in particular registers as a complex, sensual character. Novion even manages a couple of showy pieces of filmcraft – bafflement is Rupf’s face dissolving through the chalk board calculations to a white screen or the running figure left distant in the final scene, as the camera follows Frison.

 

Can’t help wondering how many more intriguing films like this play in European neighbourhood cinemas without us hearing about them.