"Sixteen is a great age to see a movie, there on a threshold between wide-eyed wonder and something like maturity. That's how old I was when I first laid eyes on The Talented Mr Ripley, Anthony Minghella's ravishing, exquisitely grim 1999 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's flinty 1955 novel. I'd been a movie fan for years at that point, but something about its elegant menace, its beauty flecked with blood, grabbed ahold of me like little had previously."
"Minghella, who died in 2008, was a master of style, crafting wholly credible visions of the past. His prowess is perhaps best on display in Ripley, which takes the viewer on a grand tour of mid-20th-century Italy, both its sun-splashed coastal languor and its more anxious, cobble-gray city streets. Tom Ripley, a low-birth conman sent to Europe's blessed boot to retrieve a prodigal shipping scion at his father's behest, is in awe of the country, as are we in the audience;"
The Talented Mr Ripley merges elegant menace with sunlit Italian beauty to portray queer longing and loneliness that escalate into murder. Anthony Minghella's direction creates a wholly credible mid-20th-century Italy, balancing coastal languor with anxious urban streets. Gabriel Yared's alternately forbidding and playful score, with a seductive clarinet and ominously plinking glockenspiel, envelops the protagonist as he descends into deceit. Tom Ripley, a low-birth conman tasked with retrieving a prodigal heir, becomes in awe of Italy and increasingly desperate to remain there. The film sustains high-grade suspense while offering a bitter, empathetic meditation on unspoken desire and social exclusion.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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