Here is a documentary about the love affairs of Patricia Highsmith, the author of Strangers on a Train and the Ripley series. These inspired hit movies from directors including Hitchcock, René Clément and Anthony Minghella, which cemented her reputation and bestseller-income and subsidised her elegant European wanderings and encounters; from this film, directed by Eva Vitija, I learned that Highsmith wrote journals in French, German and Spanish.
It is certainly a heartfelt tribute, with some interesting interviews with Highsmith’s old lovers, lots of sharp, intimate snapshots of Highsmith (evidently taken in each case by her lover at the time), TV interview archive material in which she is always unexpectedly accommodating and polite, and flavoursome readings from her letters and diaries with Gwendoline Christie providing the voiceover.
But it is basically droningly reverent, as well as sometimes bland and naive. The anguish, uproar and emotional pain inflicted on both parties by her love affairs goes often unnoticed: the jagged edges are smoothed down. The film skates over Highsmith’s legendary obsessive stalking of the woman who inspired the heroine of her pseudonymous gay novel The Price of Salt, later re-named Carol. And this film is very squeamish on that ugly side to Highsmith’s personality with which all students and biographers have to engage, like it or not: her ugly, cantankerous antisemitism, which Vitija waves away merely as ranting in her later years, primly claiming it as part of a general, grumpy bigotry, and coyly not quoting anything.
In fact, Highsmith’s loathing of Jewish people was very specific, and can’t be ignored. The elegiac tone here doesn’t work, although there are some enjoyably spiky interviews with Highsmith’s Texan cousins who give a hint of Highsmith’s own vinegar in their fierce reaction to the film-maker’s revelations about certain sexual indiscretions: “Shut UP!”
• Loving Highsmith is released on 14 April in UK and Irish cinemas, and is streaming in Australia on Docplay from 27 April.
