Under the blinding Mediterranean sun, every shadow disappears. And in the absence of shadows, consciousness also disappears. With Purple Noon, René Clément does not simply direct a thriller based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith; he orchestrates a pagan work, a sunny noir where light does not reveal the truth, but dissolves it, bleaching it until it becomes an aesthetic abstraction. Morality, sins, guilt: everything evaporates under the indifferent gaze of a star that is, at the same time, accomplice and supreme judge. The film is a dazzling canvas onto which the sparkling void of modern desire is projected, a void embodied with chilling perfection by the face of Alain Delon, here in his first, definitive encounter with myth.
His Tom Ripley is not yet the neurotic and fragile sociopath that Anthony Minghella will give us decades later. Delon's is a fallen angel with icy eyes, a creature of pure ambition whose amorality stems not from trauma but from an almost Nietzschean lucidity. He is an aesthetic parasite. Sent to Italy to bring home the rich and spoiled Philippe Greenleaf (a superb Maurice Ronet in his indolent cruelty), Ripley does not simply want Philippe's money, his boat, or his woman, Marge (an ethereal and melancholic Marie Laforêt). He wants his existence. His hunger is not material, it is ontological. In this, Clément proves himself to be a very astute reader of Highsmith, grasping that the crux of the drama is not class envy, but an act of predatory mimesis, an existential vampirism. Ripley observes Philippe not as a servant observes his master, but as an artist observes his model before destroying him and taking his place.
The first part of the film is a ballet for three of psychological cruelty, a ménage à trois of frustrated desires and subtle humiliations that plays out between the sun-drenched squares of Rome and the crystal-clear waters off the coast of Ischia. Clément orchestrates this tension with the precision of a watchmaker, but it is his director of photography, the legendary Henri Decaë—who, ironically, would link his name to the Nouvelle Vague of Truffaut and Malle—who transforms the landscape into a character. The sea has never been so beautiful and so threatening, an amniotic cobalt blue that promises pleasure and oblivion. It is a reversal of the noir canon: danger does not lurk in dark alleys, but in the blinding openness of the open sea. It is a reverse Caravaggio, a “solar chiaroscuro” where evil does not emerge from darkness but is born of light itself.
And then, the key scene. Philippe's murder on the boat is a masterpiece of brutal anti-spectacularity. There is none of the stylized elegance of a Hitchcockian crime; there is clumsiness, physical effort, the dull sound of blows, the fish thrashing in a final spasm of life, almost echoing that of Philippe. It is a disjointed, dirty, desperate act, whose jarring violence is amplified by the contrast with the placid beauty of the setting. At that moment, Ripley kills not only a man; he kills his double, his object of desire, in a rite of passage that has the sinister overtones of a human sacrifice. It is here that the film transcends genre and becomes a meta-textual reflection: the young, unknown, and beautiful Delon cinematically “kills” the more established actor, Ronet, to steal his scene, his role, his identity as the protagonist. His rise to stardom is inscribed in the narrative itself.
From that moment on, Purple Noon becomes a hypnotic descent into the performance of identity. Ripley, who practices imitating Philippe's signature, wearing his clothes, and modulating his voice on the phone, is not simply a con man. He is a total actor, a replicant seeking to absorb the soul of his original. There is an echo of Dostoevsky, but while Raskolnikov was tormented by philosophy and the weight of his act, Ripley is concerned only with the logistics and aesthetics of his substitution. His only torment is the risk of a bad performance. In his dedication to appearance, Ripley is a spiritual brother to Wilde's Dorian Gray: his beauty is the perfect mask that hides a soul that is not corrupt, but simply absent, a blank sheet on which any name can be written.
Clément's film, released in 1960, occupies a fascinating space in the landscape of French cinema. It does not belong to the “tradition of quality” that the Nouvelle Vague wanted to demolish, but neither does it espouse its anarchic and deconstructed aesthetic. It is a work of superb classicism, with a rock-solid script and direction that leaves nothing to chance, yet exudes a disconcerting modernity. It does so in its use of real locations, in its sensitivity to the alienation of its characters, in the psychological ambiguity that, although toned down compared to the novel, pervades every frame. The homoerotic subtext, so obvious in Highsmith, is here sublimated into an intense, almost suffocating, homo-sociality. Ripley's gaze on Philippe is charged with a mixture of admiration, envy, and a desire that transcends simple friendship, an attraction to an image of confident and privileged masculinity that he can only imitate and, ultimately, destroy in order to possess it.
It is impossible not to draw a parallel with Antonioni's masterpiece released in the same year, L'Avventura. Both films are set in a picture-postcard Italy populated by bored and apathetic rich people, and both revolve around a disappearance that reveals the existential emptiness of the characters. But where Antonioni explores apathy and incommunicability with a metaphysical gaze, Clément grafts the relentless mechanics of the thriller onto this same terrain, creating an extraordinary hybrid: an existential drama with the heartbeat of a noir. And then there is Nino Rota's score, which fluctuates between jazzy unease and epic melancholy, commenting on the action not so much to create suspense as to underline the tragic fatality that hangs over this earthly paradise.
The ending, altered from the novel, is an almost obligatory concession to the moral codes of the time, but Clément shoots it with a cruel irony that amplifies its power. Ripley, triumphant, lying on a sunbed, orders a drink and enjoys his success. He believes he has committed the perfect crime, that he has rewritten his own existence. But the sea, his silent accomplice, is about to betray him. The camera rises slowly, in an almost divine upward movement, revealing Philippe's body entangled in the propeller of the boat being pulled ashore. The truth does not emerge from a police investigation, but literally from the depths. The sun that hid the crime now reveals it in all its evidence. It is a mocking deus ex machina, a closing of the circle that offers no real moral catharsis, but only the realization that even the most talented of impostors cannot completely escape the weight of reality. Tom Ripley's meticulously constructed dream is shattered not by human error, but by a twist of fate. And his face, until a moment before a mask of serene contentment, is the last, unforgettable image of an angel whose wings have just been torn off.