The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999)
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this was pretty great, especially damon’s performance - i’m surprised he didn’t get more nominations or awards for it. it seemed like a lot of what they wanted out of this was the evocativeness of the young-and-carefree-living-the-simple-life-in-italy scenes. and those were fine, but went a little overboard - first gwyneth picking oranges and then 2 scenes later she buys some oranges on the street? how many oranges is she eating? but they move off of this quickly enough, and the slow revelation of what ripley’s intentions were kept things creepy enough when they did go too far.
obviously class is an explicit issue of the story, but there’s something strange about how they approach ripley as a character. we don’t see any of his past, with the only glimpse being his piano playing, but it seems like the force of the story is uncovering dickie’s history and understanding him. i guess i’m suggesting there’s an implicit understanding that the whole of ripley’s motivations are his lower-class ambition and his love of dickie - a lot of which is still class-based. i guess ripley being something of a cipher to the other characters is important, but i think it’s more a case of just assuming certain things about poor people.
