Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Purple Noon
1960 · René Clément · Purple Noon on Sightlines
A young man bends over a sheet of paper and writes another man's name. Then he writes it again. René Clément films this the way he films everything in Purple Noon: patiently, in full view, as if a forgery were a craft worth watching someone learn. It is. Hold on to that signature, because the whole film is in it.
Tom Ripley, played by a twenty-four-year-old Alain Delon, has been sent to Italy to bring home Philippe Greenleaf, a rich, careless American who has no intention of going home. Tom is supposed to fetch Philippe. Instead he studies him. He watches how Philippe spends money, how he treats his girlfriend Marge, how he wears his clothes. At one point Tom slips into the other man's jacket. It could be a boy's game of dress-up. It could be the first step of a theft. The film doesn't tell you which, and that small uncertainty is where it starts to work on you.
Gilles Deleuze has a term for a gesture like that: the index of equivocity. In his account of classical cinema, actions usually tell us what situation we are in. A punch means a fight. A kiss means a romance. But some acts could belong to two different situations at once, and the film keeps us suspended between them. Tom trying on the jacket is that kind of act. So is nearly everything he does in the film's first stretch. He is charming, attentive and useful, and every one of those qualities could be friendship or reconnaissance.
This belongs to what Deleuze calls the small form of the action-image. In the large form, a vast situation presses on a hero until he acts to change it, the way a Western's frontier calls forth a showdown. The small form runs the other way. A single act, often a modest one, discloses a situation we had only partly seen. Purple Noon is built from these disclosures. The film's question, as it moves along, is rarely "will he be caught?" in the abstract. It is how Tom will get past the next thing: a suspicious friend, a hotel clerk, a signature that has to match. Each improvisation shows us a little more of what he is and of the world that lets him get away with it. Françoise Javet's editing keeps pace with him almost procedurally. We watch a lie being built, then maintained, piece by piece.
That brings us to the figure Deleuze cared about most in this territory: the forger. In his second cinema book Deleuze argues that modern film found a new power when it stopped protecting the truth. Classical narration made a contract with us: films don't lie. Whatever the characters believed, the camera showed what really happened. The forger is the character who breaks that contract from inside. He doesn't just tell lies. He produces truths that hold, identities that work, a self made out of someone else's papers and habits. Deleuze found this figure in Orson Welles. He never wrote about Clément. But Tom Ripley may be popular cinema's purest forger, and watching him through this lens shows what the film is really interested in. It isn't guilt or detection. It is fabrication as a skill, and the strange pleasure of watching someone get good at it.
Notice, though, that Clément keeps his forger inside a fairly orderly world. The camera itself never lies to us. We see each forgery being made. The film stands on the threshold Deleuze describes. Its hero has the powers of the false, but its storytelling still answers to the old contract. Much of the film's tension comes from the friction between the two.
Then there is Delon's face. Deleuze calls the close-up the affection-image: a feeling registered on a face that hasn't yet been released into action. He distinguishes the intensive face, where tiny movements build toward a breaking point, from the reflecting face, still and smooth, holding a single quality. Delon gives Clément the reflecting face almost exclusively. He withholds. He doesn't signal guilt or pleasure. His beauty works like an alibi, and the face gives back whatever we bring to it. That blankness is a performance choice and the film's moral trap. We trust Tom for the same reason the other characters do.
And all of this happens in the sun. The French title, Plein soleil, means "full sun," and Henri Decaë's cinematography takes it at its word. Crime cinema of the period lived in shadow. Decaë pushes the Mediterranean toward glare: near-blinding whites, a hard blue sea, interiors with nowhere dark to stand. Deleuze's term affective color fits exactly. This is a color that absorbs the whole scene and its feeling, rather than decorating it. Here the feeling is exposure. Nothing can hide, and that is what makes the hiding so unnerving. The long sequences on Philippe's yacht, with three people circling each other on a small sunlit deck, turn the boat into a floating stage where tension builds in plain daylight. Nino Rota's score, lyrical and almost wistful, refuses to tell us to be afraid.
The film's craft has clear ancestors. Strangers on a Train gave Clément Highsmith's charming, guilt-bound double. Clément's own Forbidden Games gave him the patient framing and restrained cutting he turns here toward suspense. From Le Silence de la mer, Decaë brought his available-light method of modeling opaque faces in real rooms. Bob le flambeur and Elevator to the Gallows had already shown he could stage cool-blooded crime on real streets and carry a thriller's whole tone. Paul Gégauff, who co-wrote the screenplay with Clément, came from Les Cousins with its bourgeois cruelty and class envy, and that envy is the motor of Tom's interest in Philippe's world. Where the film went next is simpler to say. Every later Ripley has been measured against this one.
What Clément moved forward was the idea that dread could be bright. He made complicity a matter of light and surface: the jacket, the passport, the signature, the face. When you watch, look at the hands. Tom's real talent shows in what he does with objects that belong to someone else. Then ask yourself, at each new improvisation, which way you were hoping it would go.
Concepts in play
- the forger (le faussaire) — Ripley as mimic and forger: practicing Philippe's signature, handling his passport, building and keeping up a borrowed identity through a series of improvisations
- index of equivocity — Tom trying on Philippe's jacket and his attentive watchfulness at the edge of Philippe's life, acts that could mean play or friendship as easily as appropriation
- action-image, small form — The dramatic engine of moment-to-moment improvisation past each threat (a suspicious friend, a hotel clerk, a signature that must match), with the editing following almost procedurally how a lie is built
- reflecting vs intensive face — Delon's smooth, watchful, unreadable performance that withholds guilt or pleasure; his beauty works as an alibi and leaves a controlled blank for the viewer to fill
- affective color — Decaë's sun-drenched palette of near-blinding whites and hard blue sea, which turns sunlight oppressive and exposing and puts menace in brightness rather than shadow