Sydney Film Festival - LOVING HIGHSMITH (Eva Vitija, Switzerland/Germany, 2022)

Time was, pre-plague, when this blog was filled with reviews from the Sydney Film Festival “Ou sont les neiges d’antan”

Some quick notes off the top of the head, even though all screenings of this movies at the SFF have been completed but the film will be released in Australia by Madman.

 

Patricia Highsmith was born in 1921 and died in 1995. Her life and her work remain fascinating for the circle of admirers. That circle continues to slowly expand. Her books remain in print and continue to be adapted into films. For much of her life she lived in fairly frugal circumstances. (I have written about her  in Senses of Cinema and repeated myself quite a lot including when I reviewed Joanna Murray-Smith’s play about Highsmith on this blog.) 

 

Eva Vitija’s film  of Highsmith’s life focuses on three of the author’s relationships with Marijane Meaker, Tabea Blumenschein and Monique Buffet. There were many more, some short some lengthier, most of them ending unhappily, and the three who do give their time are remarkably open and honest about the difficulties they experienced. 

 

All of this means you aren’t offered a clear picture at what it was about Highsmith’s writing that has endeared her and the couple of dozen novels to generations. You have to look elsewhere for that though I guess the audience already knows anyway why they are there and why they are curious about that tempestuous personal and often public life. She did speak to lots of people on the record, some in the film being very earnest indeed in seeking to pin down why her particular and quite unique literature has endured. (If I have one quibble about the archival material in the film it is that it is not dated on screen. You are left to judge by the progressive deterioration of her face from its extraordinary youthful beauty to the alcohol and cigarette ravaged visage of her last years.)

 

The film dips into some of the movies based on her books, Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr Ripley, The American Friend and Carol. The latter gets quite a lot of attention notably for its publication under a pseudonym and then its slowly growing reputation, it being then ( and for a long time) the only lesbian novel which had a ‘happy’ ending. There is no mention at all of Alain Delon’s Ripley in Plein Soleil. The film adaptations actually were slow to get going. By 1976 there had only been Strangers, Plein Soleil and Claude Autant-Lara’s adaptation of The Blunderer. But they came in a rush from the late 70s onwards, possibly because Wim Wenders lead the way and other Germans followed. I suspect that it was the film money rather than the always spotty book sales that pitched Highsmith into her final striking home in Switzerland and eventually caused her to leave a very substantial estate.

 

One matter the film rushes through is her racial prejudice and her anti-semitism. The film mentions that late in her life she was prone to delivering rants quite publicly.  But as early as 1977 in Edith’s Diary  the hapless Edith is pilloried by her friends for writing a letter to her local newspaper questioning the intelligence level of black people. Highsmith held that view for a long time.

 

Loving Highsmith  is a terrific doco about a person who inspires seemingly endless curiosity. The biographies, the republications and the film adaptations may never end. There may even be more Ripleys to come.