DVD Review: Purple Noon (1960)

December 7, 2012 Approved By NP, Reviews No Comments

Cast: Alain Delon, Maurice Ronet, Marie Laforêt
Director: René Clément
Country: France | Italy
Genre: Crime | Thriller | Drama
Official Trailer: Here

Editor’s Notes: Purple Noon was released on Criterion DVD and Blu-ray December 4th.

Filmmaker René Clément and actor Alain Delon made four films together: Purple Noon (1960), The Joy of Life (1961), Joy House (1964), and Is Paris Burning? (1966). Of these four films, Purple Noon, like the English title implies, is the only one made in colour. And of these four films, Purple Noon is the most accomplished and absorbing one in terms of mood, performance, and use of space. Clément and Delon were certainly aided by Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, which kickstarted Highsmith’s five-novel series involving the character Tom Ripley (known as the “Ripliad”) and the work of which Purple Noon is an adaptation. While brother-producers Robert/Raymond Hakim suggested the adaptation, Clément dove headlong into the project and initiated a second stage of his filmmaking career, made stars of Delon and Marie Laforêt, and stood his ground in the face of the onslaught of the French New Wave.

The film immediately establishes its jet-set world with the literal image-sound of a small plane in the middle of the ocean, while Nino Rota’s incomparable music accompanies picture-postcard images of Italy against the opening credits…

The film immediately establishes its jet-set world with the literal image-sound of a small plane in the middle of the ocean, while Nino Rota’s incomparable music accompanies picture-postcard images of Italy against the opening credits and smoothes out the rough sounds of the plane’s engine. The postcard images of Italy segue to actual postcards and to the film’s main characters, Tom Ripley (Delon) and Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet), who are currently in Rome. For these two, Italy is one big bar-spectacle in which to play and have a laugh, toying with people (a blind man, a drunken woman) as if they were props and dishing out money as if it were meaningless paper whose source is endless.

At the same time, the issue of class is seamlessly woven throughout Ripley and Greenleaf’s play-fun, or rigolade (a word that crops up often during their conversations, as verb and noun), which eventually becomes dangerous. Ripley’s lower class status is made evident early on, through the disdain shown to him by Greenleaf’s fellow moneyed friend Freddy; Ripley’s constant mention of the $5000 he will receive from Greenleaf’s father once they return to San Francisco; and the way Delon performs Ripley, a bit gangly, childlike, and uncertain all at once, in contrast to the ‘adults’ around him. When Greenleaf discovers Ripley (with a whip in hand, no less) trying on his clothes and kissing narcissistically the mirror while imitating him, Ripley reacts like a schoolboy caught by the headmaster. In a similar instance, a flash of the naïve schoolboy caught by the headmaster crosses Ripley’s face when he delivers to Marge (Laforêt), Greenleaf’s fiancée, a letter that Ripley wrote under the guise of Greenleaf and Marge remarks the strangeness of Greenleaf signing the letter with his full name.

Yet what makes Delon’s Ripley so fascinating is that buttressing against the gangliness, childish quality, and diffidence is the superlative, hypnotic beauty of his face, which Clément subjected to innumerable close-ups throughout the film. Dialogue is actually not very plentiful here. Clément opted instead to focus on the look, le regard, of the characters—at each other, lost in thought, at themselves, from others—especially Ripley, whose calculating mind is not revealed through soliloquies or voiceovers but through Delon’s darting eyes and quick, incognito gestures (the drunken woman’s earring that he keeps from the night in Rome for future plans) and the unending alertness to details (Greenleaf’s bank transactions). Also palpable through Delon’s look is the element of improvisation in Ripley, an improvisation of killing and maintaining the identity of Greenleaf once he kills him.

…what makes Delon’s Ripley so fascinating is that buttressing against the gangliness, childish quality, and diffidence is the superlative, hypnotic beauty of his face, which Clément subjected to innumerable close-ups throughout the film.

With Clément’s knowledge of the Mediterranean and being a sailing connoisseur and Henri Decaë’s spectacular cinematography, the focus on the Mediterranean sunlight and open-air spaces is also an immense factor in the film’s adaptation allure. The actual Italian locations on which most of the film was shot, along with the force of the real that emanates from them, encase and bump against the narrative in a highly effective way. They make alive the Europeanness of Highsmith’s story, while Clément’s own details—such as the ballet company and their practice quarters in an old, ornate building in Mongibello—reinforce this world’s grand haut milieu, of which Ripley is organically not a part.

The physical magnetism of the Mediterranean and Delon work tremendously to pull in the spectator towards the awkward yet cunning Ripley in his murders, which is the emotional hinge of Highsmith’s novel and Clément’s film. With Delon’s stunning face-mask tempered by a naïveté, the humiliations to which Greenleaf subjects Ripley further compels the spectator to side with Ripley. These humiliations reach their apogee during the half-hour sequence on Greenleaf’s yacht: an inexperienced Ripley tending the boat, holding a knife improperly, being sent to “exile” on the yacht’s dinghy, and getting awfully sunburned in the process. A marvelous, seemingly throwaway sequence that captures this joint physical magnetism as well as Clément’s documentary film beginnings is the one in which Ripley wanders in an open-air fish market: set to the sounds of Rota’s music and without dialogue, Clément’s camera captures Delon-Ripley engaging with this actual space.

The link between Ripley and food is not accidental. A crucial characterisation of Ripley is the way he eats before and after his crimes: the casual cutting of sausage and bread while lying on the deck of Greenleaf’s yacht prior to Marge’s departure and the two men’s ongoing rigolade that ends in a murder; the voracious biting-into of the peach after disposing of Greenleaf’s body from the yacht; the quiet, hunched manner of eating the chicken in a tight corner of the grandest of his hotel rooms after killing Freddy. This characterisation is part and parcel of the physicality of Delon’s performance and the labour of murder, which includes the act of disposing of the body. Clément devotes nearly five minutes of Ripley disposing of the corpse following each murder. Through such laborious attention, Clément and Delon convey Ripley’s mix of confidence, desire, and naïveté in the pursuit of becoming someone—which, incidentally, plays into Clément’s use of mirrors in several scenes.

Extras:

While an audio commentary is always nice, in a sense the nearly half-hour interview with film historian Denitza Bantcheva makes for the lack of one. She provides a rather thorough history of the film’s production and Clément’s career up to Purple Noon, revealing insights at the level of improvisation, Clément’s status in the French film industry at the time, and his insistence on Delon playing Ripley, among other things. As a result, she further expands the dimensions of the film and compels one to watch it all over again. Geoffrey O’Brien’s essay in the DVD booklet is a terrific critical complementary piece to Bantcheva’s interview.

But perhaps the real gem is the excerpted, English translation interview with Clément from 1981.

One gets a marvelous sense of Clément’s highly adventurous filmmaking aesthetic, including his approach to literary adaptation and character construction and motivation, inflected as it is by his eclectic background in architecture, documentary film, and working with Jean Cocteau on La belle et la bête (1946), Cocteau’s debut feature.

The archival interviews with Delon (1962) and Highsmith (1971) on French television are great additions. While Highsmith does not mention Purple Noon, the interview provides a rare glimpse of this legendary writer discussing her solitary life, the theme of guilt in her works, and the inspiration for the character of Ripley. In contrast, Delon addresses directly Clément and his influence, calling him his ‘professor,’ among other directors who have played a pivotal role in his debut and career.

99/100 ~ MASTERFUL. The physical magnetism of the Mediterranean and Delon work tremendously to pull in the spectator towards the awkward yet cunning Ripley in his murders, which is the emotional hinge of Highsmith’s novel and Clément’s film.

By Rowena Santos Aquino

Sr. Staff Film Critic: Recently obtained my doctoral degree in Cinema and Media studies at UCLA. Linguaphile and cinephile, and therefore multingual in my cinephilia. Asian cinemas, Spanish language filmmaking, Middle Eastern cinemas, and documentary film.