“Loving Highsmith”: Film Review

Gwendolyn Christie reads with cool authority revealing snippets of this prose, her fiction, as well as her journal and notebook entries, all written in a brief descriptive style that marks it as the same work. This creates the illusion that Haysmith is speaking directly to us, which gives the film a very personal feel.

Vitia was primarily drawn to the author’s novels, with their cinematic stories, making them a fruitful source for film adaptation. But only after reading his diaries did Haysmith fall in love with a difficult woman.

At first, I almost looked at the filmmaker suddenly abandoning the narrative (there was often a red flag in the documentary), though Vitya’s voice remains a helpful guide as he tracks down the women Heismith loved and the places that helped him. your restless life. “I am a perpetual seeker,” says the writer, a self-assertion confirmed by his frequent travels, after it became clear that the freedom to remain in America would be difficult.

Many of us who have eaten Haysmith’s novels and the films based on them are well aware of his character, his insidious eye for fragrant detail, and his incredible ability to show us even the most morally dubious characters. But the writer’s own opinions are usually more limited.

Vitia’s film explores the illuminating chapters of her childhood; His hunger for the love of an emotionally distant mother; And the paradox of an incredibly attractive woman who was so desirable in New York’s lesbian bars in the 1950s and is still forced to remain in the shadows. One of the earliest performances is a melancholy vision of an inner self-loathing that was fueled by a mother who heavily criticized his men’s wardrobe choices, asking, “Why not dress like a woman?”

Haysmith says his character was formed during the first six years. Patricia’s mother Mary, who divorced nine days before her father was born, left her with her grandmother in Fort Worth, Texas and moved to New York to live with Patricia’s stepmother Stanley Haysmith. By her own admission, Mary drank turpentine in an unsuccessful attempt to have an abortion, a variant which Patricia reportedly valiantly supported.

Vitija speaks at length on her mother’s side with relatives in Texas who confirm they rarely saw Patricia and Mary together. Organized by photo albums, they also show how much livestock and rodeo were part of family life. Even after Patricia became a successful novelist, her popularity in Texas was restored by the career of her cousin Dan, a rodeo radio editor.

The visual motif of rodeo riders and the evocative use of Noel Akhote’s guitar in the score indicate the extent to which cowboy culture influenced and alienated Haysmith’s personal style. She was more receptive to New York, even to her mother’s constant attempts to overcome her lack of interest in her children by setting up dates or later reconciling potential husbands.

“It’s like walking into a trap,” he said, describing the one-night stand of peace he forced on the 16-year-old boy of a mother-approved friend at the end of dinner and dancing nights. “To me, sex is like steel wool in the face,” she later wrote of her relationships with men. Still, guilt dominated her feelings and she saw doctors trying to change her to please her mother. These mixed feelings may also account for the predominance of male characters in her fiction, with one significant exception. Carol.

Vitija weaves together well-selected clips from Haysmith’s four major film adaptations, each with a specific inspirational track. For her first novel, strangers on the train, was the idea of ​​swapping the murders of two men. Heismith considered this book and the classic Hitchcock film version, with the gruesome deleted scene here in which Robert Walker Bruno delays his victim before taking a ride through an amusement park before being strangled, a mystery writer, which he found degrading. .

spark to the price of salt It was more personal: closing his eyes while working in a department store with an attractive customer he’d never seen before. Scene with Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara in Todd Haynes Carol Shows how Haysmith used the hypnotic spell in this meeting.

Tom Ripley, described by one of Haysmith’s ex-girlfriends as the author’s alter ego, started out as a man who watched him walk alone on the beach early in the morning in Positano, Italy. He never spoke to her, but a thrilling example of a fiction writer’s fantasy is watching Matt Damon graduate from Anthony Mingela’s film. Talented Mr. Ripley, Experiencing different personalities in size. The violent scene where Dick Greenleaf kills Jude Law is still amazing.

Ripley’s idea of ​​a double life (conflicting desires, male/female sides, disregard for the usual norms of crime) was clearly of interest to Highsmith. German actress Taba Blumenshain – the inspiration for Ripley’s fourth novel, The guy who followed RipleyWhat crushed Haysmith when he refused to move to France with her after their fling points to the writer’s passion for the hermaphroditic nature of snails as a parallel: “He liked people who were a little shy.”

The third book in the series, ripley gameInspired by Wim Wenders american friend; Dennis Hopper’s clip in the title role, which discusses his identity crisis (“I know less and less who I am or who someone else is”), seems to mirror Haysmith’s disordered condition.

More directly on the personal front, Vitia includes lengthy interviews with Haysmith’s three surviving lovers. In addition to Blumenshain speaking for fun in the Berlin Stony Bar scene, American writer Marijuana Meeker offers a perspective on how to write about lesbian life in the Highmith liberation process. the price of saltEven publishing it was a challenge.

Micker and Haysmith (and five cats) moved to rural Pennsylvania at a time when two women lived together, more likely out of financial necessity than a romantic union. Haysmith’s habit of starting the day with gin and orange juice surprised his partner (“He’s afraid I’ll drink, I’m afraid of his temper,” Haysmith wrote), but it may have been Miker who ended their relationship. . On your blogs.

Haysmith’s travels in Europe were originally motivated by a desire to be outside the United States. the price of salt Published, despite the relative anonymity of the pseudonym. But the mainland soon proved better for him in many ways. France, in particular, established a certain calm during its life in the village of Moncourt, in a beautiful old house, with a garden that occupied it. His ex-girlfriend Monique Buffett talks about women admiring Haysmith in Paris lesbian bars. “Sexual love can become a religion,” Haysmith wrote of those years.

More intense, but ultimately more unhappy, was his relationship with a British woman married after his death, known here only as Caroline. Haysmith bought a house in England near her, but Caroline turned out to be more conventional than the writer expected, and the relationship took a sadistic turn. “The worst period of my life,” describes her painful separation, the negativity she felt from her mother. This distance inspired her decision to never live with anyone again.

The loneliness of Haysmith’s final years in Switzerland, where he died in 1995, is evident in such confessions as: “Writing, of course, is a substitute for a life I can’t live, I can’t.” But one of the small weaknesses of the documentary is that Vitia is about the bitterness, racism and anti-Semitism that found its way into Haysmith’s notebooks. The filmmaker calls this a return to the fanaticism he learned from his Texas grandmother, though it’s unclear how much of that superstition has always existed.

Probably a real achievement love haysmith However, it is the degree of access he gives to the inner life of a well-known protected woman, to whom he described the interview as “profound disgust”. “I carry old memories like a heavy suitcase,” he wrote. A wonderful balance of emotional and intellectual curiosity and an elegant collection of rich archives of home movies, photos and interviews, this film opens up those memories with tantalizing sincerity.