Ripley's Game (Liliana Cavani, 2002)

Dougray Scott and John Malkovich in Ripley's Game

Cast: John Malkovich, Dougray Scott, Ray Winstone, Lena Heady, Chiara Caselli, Sam Blitz, Paolo Paoloni, Evelina Meghnagi, Lutz Winde, Wilfred Xander. Screenplay: Charles McKeown, Liliana Cavani, based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith. Cinematography: Alfio Contini. Production design: Francesco Frigeri. Film editing: Jon Harris. Music: Ennio Morricone. 

Patricia Highsmith's novel Ripley's Game was filmed before, by Wim Wenders, as The American Friend (1977), a movie that's more Wenders than Highsmith. When I saw that version, as witty and accomplished as it is, I commented that it made me want to see the story done more slickly and conventionally, which is exactly what Liliana Cavani does in her version. The novel was Patricia Highsmith's third about the chameleonic and psychotic Tom Ripley. Most of us have seen one or more of the versions of her first Ripley novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, whether in the versions filmed by René Clément (as Plein Soleil or Purple Noon) in 1960, by Anthony Minghella (under the original title) in 1999, or by Steven Zaillian (as Ripley) in the TV series in 2023. But few of us have seen the film version of the intermediate novel, Ripley Under Ground, a critical and commercial failure directed by Roger Spottiswoode in 2005, in which we learn that Ripley has flourished on his ill-gotten gains and is further enriching himself as a dealer in art forgeries. So Cavani's Ripley's Game begins rather abruptly, with Ripley (John Malkovich) engaged in a shady transaction and yet another murder. But more important, the character of Ripley has changed: Malkovich's Ripley doesn't have the specious charm of the ones played by Alain Delon, Matt Damon, or Andrew Scott -- maybe because he doesn't need it, being already on top of the world. This lack of charm and vulnerability is a problem for the film to overcome, especially when it invests some of those traits in the film's chief victim, Jonathan Trevanny (Dougray Scott). Trevanny should elicit our sympathy: He's dying of leukemia and has an attractive wife (Lena Heady) and small son (Sam Blitz), and he desperately wants to leave them well off after his death. Unfortunately, Ripley overhears Trevanny scoffing at Ripley's wealth and taste at a dinner party, and immediately sets out to get even. What follows is the familiar Ripleyan snarl of schemes and murders. And in the end, it demonstrates what was wrong with my reaction to Wenders's version: Slickness and convention aren't enough to make a really good film, sometimes what you need is an auteur.

The Night Porter (Liliana Cavani, 1974)

Charlotte Rampling and Dirk Bogarde in The Night Porter

Cast: Dirk Bogarde, Charlotte Rampling, Philippe Leroy, Gabriele Ferzetti, Giuseppe Addobbati, Isa Miranda, Nino Bignamini, Marino Masé, Amadei Amodio. Screenplay: Liliana Cavani, Italo Moscati, Barbara Alberti, Amedeo Pagani. Cinematography: Alfio Contini. Art direction: Nedo Azzini, Jean Marie Simon. Film editing: Franco Arcalli. Music: Daniele Paris.

I don't mind if a movie is offensive as long as what it makes me think and feel is more significant than what offends me. But Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter, celebrated and damned for its offensive central story, the doomed love affair of a former SS officer and the concentration camp survivor whom he loved and abused, doesn't have enough substance to its characters to make its offensiveness meaningful or even credible. Despite performances of deep conviction by Dirk Bogarde as Max and Charlotte Rampling as Lucia, we still know them by their labels: ex-Nazi and masochistic victim. We can only infer why they were drawn together in the camp and why they remain drawn together years later, when he has become a night porter in a Viennese hotel that's a hotbed of decadent characters and she has married a celebrated orchestra conductor. What causes Lucia to give up this apparently successful marriage to degrade herself with this creep? And what's with this assortment of ex-Nazis who are destroying old records and eliminating witnesses to their wartime crimes -- other than, of course, a plot device that puts the lives of Max and Lucia in jeopardy. Why is there a long sequence about the ballet dancer who used to perform shirtless for the SS and now seems to be restricted to private performances for Max, who works the lights for the performances? Is it to evoke the homoerotic element of Nazism, itself a wrongheaded and offensive trope? Nothing in The Night Porter holds up to very close scrutiny. And yet it's a hypnotically watchable film that dares you to take it seriously as it unrolls, but just left me feeling jaded and unsatisfied when it was over.