Ripley's Game · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Begin with the wire. A harpsichord is strung with it; so is a garrote. Liliana Cavani's film keeps noticing that the materials of Tom Ripley's two vocations — making beauty, removing inconvenient men — are nearly the same, and it never once raises its voice about the resemblance. Alfio Contini holds a medium shot. Malkovich's face moves a quarter inch. When violence finally arrives, it erupts into the composure instead of shattering it. That refusal to flinch isn't coldness. It's the film's whole thesis about its man.

Tom Ripley is, before he is anything else, a forger. Highsmith built her series on it, and Deleuze has a name for what a forger does to the film around him. He called it the powers of the false. Most movies honor a quiet contract: the image testifies, what we're shown is what occurred. The forger breaks that contract from inside the story. He doesn't merely lie about a fact; he manufactures a reality and dares you to tell the difference. Ripley's 'game' is exactly this. Out of a petty social slight he wagers that a mild, dying picture-framer can be authored into a hit man. Jonathan Trevanny (Dougray Scott) isn't deceived about some detail. He is rewritten. Ripley forges a new man the way he'd forge a signature, patiently, and the suspense is simply whether the forgery holds once it's loose in the world.

What keeps this concrete rather than abstract is the casting. Malkovich plays taste itself as the forger's medium. Deleuze's affection-image is the close-up: a feeling registered on a face but not yet spent in action, and its purest form is the reflecting face — immobile, holding one steady quality. Ripley's quality is amused detachment, and Contini's framing exists to let it sit there, unbudging, while we lean in for a tell that never comes. Deleuze separates the reflective face, all smooth contour, from the intensive face that twitches with feeling. Ripley is nearly all contour. That's why the one thing that does leak — his disconcerting fondness for the man he's destroying — registers like a hairline crack in glass.

The glass is his villa. Deleuze's crystal-image is the moment present and reflection can no longer be told apart; its rotting variant, crystal-decomposition, is an ordered, aristocratic world quietly going bad from within. The Veneto villa is that crystal: a museum of acquired taste — paintings, the harpsichord, old wood — lit by Contini with painterly restraint so the décor argues for its owner. The rot is the owner. The same connoisseurship that selects a canvas selects a corpse; Cavani stages savagery as 'just another connoisseur's appetite.' The beautiful enclosed world doesn't oppose the killing. It cultivates it. This is the inheritance of Plein Soleil's sun-lit aesthete, whose composure stands in for conscience, and of The Conformist's class-coded architecture, where corruption is staged as opulence. Cavani takes over its grammar of class as physical space — Ripley's villa against Jonathan's cramped framing shop, the game a transgression across that line, posture and address doing the work of a social verdict.

Then the crack widens. The film modulates from manipulation into something like loyalty, and Highsmith's irony answers the question the plot poses — what if Ripley grows a conscience? — with: not conscience, attachment. That tenderness is the fissure in the perfect mirror-world, the one motion that serves nothing in the game and so can't be folded back into it.

Underneath the manners runs a darker current. Jonathan is dying. Deleuze's naturalism is a world of drives sliding down an irreversible slope toward exhaustion and death, and Jonathan's cancer literalizes that slope while the genre only flirts with it. His consent to murder, to leave his family money, is the appetite the forger has found and fed.

We know all of this from the first scene. The drama is never whodunit; it's the dread of watching a line crossed by a man we've already been told cannot uncross it. Deleuze's relation-image builds meaning from relations the viewer holds — the audience as a knowing third — and that is the suspense-of-complicity grammar Hitchcock minted in Strangers on a Train, the founding Highsmith adaptation. Cavani restages its murder-on-a-train almost literally when Jonathan works the garrote in a moving, public, claustrophobic car: Morricone drops out and the rattle of the train does the scoring. Morricone's chamber idiom itself descends from his mocking score for Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion — a cultivated man who kills and dares detection.

What does the film add to the art? It is a late, quiet proof that the powers of the false need no twist and no unreliable cut to operate. They can run entirely through a face and a code of manners. The forger's cinema is usually flamboyant — Welles palming cards, Robbe-Grillet shuffling time. Cavani's is the opposite: serene, classical, suspense-first, the falsification carried by a man who never breaks character because, for him, there's no character to break. Set it in the Ripley discourse — Clément's Delon, Wenders' American Friend made from this same novel, Minghella's striver, Zaillian's 2024 series — and Cavani's contribution is the arrived Ripley: the forger at rest, taste fully hardened into ethics' replacement. Watch the wire. Watch the face that won't tell you anything. Then watch the single moment it does.