FestivalsFilmReview

Loving Highsmith – BFI Flare 2023

Reviewer: Richard Maguire

Writer and Director: Eva Vitija

Perhaps the best way to know Patricia Highsmith is through her novels. Carol, first published under a pseudonym, could also be a template for the affair she had with a married woman years later, and Ripley, her recurring antihero, is cold and lonely, like Highsmith herself if Loving Highsmith is to be believed. We don’t get any deeper analysis in Eva Vitija’s documentary; like her subject, the film is too discreet and distant.

Vitija’s version of Highsmith is a solitary figure surrendering happiness for art. Vitija suggests that the celebrated author only experienced joy when she fell in love with a married woman who lived in England. So enamoured with this woman, Highsmith moved from America to Britain to be close to her. This woman would have been content to continue the affair endlessly, but Highsmith couldn’t bear being second best in the woman’s affections and so broke off their relationship. She moved to France.

An earlier lesbian affair broke down when her partner realised that Highsmith’s morning glasses of orange juice were loaded with gin. Their idyllic life in the country fell apart. Two other women remember their affairs with the author but none of the relationships had the happy ending that she’d given Carol all those years before.

Even her family connections are strained. She loved her mother deeply, but these feelings were never reciprocated. When Patricia was young, she wanted to be married to her mother but in adulthood having entirely lost her Texan roots, she breaks all ties with her like a divorce. Every time Texas is mentioned Vitija provides images of rodeos. Highsmith’s cousin was a famous rodeo announcer but the footage of a calf being tied down is a little on the nose.

Highsmith spends her last years in Switzerland living in a house that was nicknamed the bunker. It is here where she wrote her last novel, published a month after her death. Her diary entries at this time contain racist and antisemitic comments, but this information is given as an aside, almost as if Vitija doesn’t quite know what to do with material which could sully her subject’s reputation.

Much of Vitija’s film is comprised of old TV interviews in which Highsmith, always smoking, looks uncomfortable and bored. Entries from her diaries are read by Gwendoline Christie, but these extracts only give limited insight into the life of the reclusive and enigmatic writer. Most illuminating are the clips from the films such as Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley. Filmmakers like Hitchcock, Anthony Minghella and Todd Haynes may have loved Highsmith’s fictional creations, but Highsmith herself doesn’t make for a riveting character in this documentary that overall lacks a thesis.

Loving Highsmith is screening at BFI Flare Festival 2023 from 15 -26 March.

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