A Film Canon

The first cinematic adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels, Purple Noon is perhaps the most effective translation of her distinctively flat prose style into cinematic language. This is partly a result of Alain Delon's palpably flat, narcissistic presence, and the hand-held cinematography that transforms every mise-en-scene into his caressing mirror - especially those of the first act, which takes place almost exclusively at sea, elaborates a monochromatic, pulsing blue to rival the Fra Angelico backdrops that set the narrative in motion, and gilds Delon's body in preparation for the aristocratic spaces to follow. However, it also results from a flattening of narrative, as if to compensate for cinema's heightened tendency to encourage identification, or projections of interiority. To this end, Clement slackens Ripley's friendship with Philippe Greenleaf (Maurice Ronet) to a series of shared tics, and the murder that consummates it to the bathos of pattern recognition, producing the peculiarly unselfconscious self-referentiality of the conversation that immediately precedes it, and, more generally, a pervasive disjunction between speech and intentionality that anticipates and aestheticises dubbing. By eliding virtually everything else that precedes this act - that is, the first quarter of the novel - Clement also opens in the midst of the transit-spaces that define Ripley's subsequent trajectory, and that themselves exist in a state of slackened connection with the aristocratic capital he attempts to infiltrate - a dinghy trailing doggedly behind a yacht - thereby imbuing an otherwise disappointing conclusion with a similar arbitrariness, and ensuring the most radically decentred of Ripley's filmic incarnations; the mere wake of a presence that is never actually present, as if Delon's new formulation of star image had insinuated itself into the very fabric of the film.