Ripley's Game · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Cavani's film advances the proposition that cultivating a decent man toward murder is aesthetically indistinguishable from appreciating a great painting — and Alfio Contini's cinematography enforces that equation with every frame. Contini, whose CV runs from Antonioni's *Zabriskie Point* to Cavani's own *The Night Porter*, lights Ripley's Veneto villa in warm, lamp-lit tones drawn from Old Master interiors: harpsichord, art objects, polished wood constitute an ongoing argument about taste as substitute for conscience, so that when violence intrudes it violates a painterly order rather than a moral one. This is the film's mise-en-scène at its most precise — meaning made inside the frame before a word is spoken. The argument is completed by John Malkovich's face, and here the film becomes an affection-image: the close-up held on Malkovich registers feeling prior to, and more fundamental than, action — not anguish or remorse but a connoisseur's micro-calibrated satisfaction, the expression of a man experiencing murder as aesthetic exercise. The film's deepest craft debt is to Hitchcock's *Strangers on a Train*, Highsmith's founding screen adaptation, which invented the suspense-of-complicity grammar Cavani inherits and near-literally restages in Jonathan's garrote killing aboard a train. That inheritance is also a relation-image strategy: because we learn in the opening scene exactly what Ripley is capable of, we watch Jonathan's irreversible crossing not with horror but with Ripley's own connoisseur's fascination — folded into the game, implicated before we've thought to resist.