NZIFF Film Review: "Loving Highsmith" (2022).

From the director of My Life as A Film: How my Father tried to capture Happiness (Das Leben drehen - wie mein Vater versuchte, das Glück festzuhalten) comes Loving Highsmith. This documentary film written and directed by Eva Vitija. Drawing on the diaries of American novelist Patricia Highsmith, the film is an intimate portrait of the brilliant writer of screenplay-ready stories whose own gay desires were repressed. The Texan novelist has long been acclaimed for her strange, cinematic stories of suspense, which captured the imaginations of directors including Alfred Hitchcock, Todd Haynes, and Anthony Minghella. Best known for penning The Talented Mr. Ripley and sequels, Highsmith also wrote Carol (aka The Price of Salt), her only novel to feature an unequivocal lesbian relationship. In this intimate documentary, Highsmith’s unpublished diaries lyrically intermingle with the personal accounts of people who knew and loved her. The heart-rending character study depicts a visionary female writer, forced to repress her innate desires by a heteronormative society.

On January 19, 1921, American novelist and short story writer, widely known for her psychological thrillers, including her series of five novels featuring the character Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith was born. She wrote twenty-two novels and numerous short stories throughout her career spanning nearly five decades, and her work has led to more than two dozen film adaptations. Her writing derived influence from existentialist literature, and questioned notions of identity and popular morality. She was dubbed "the poet of apprehension" by novelist Graham Greene. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train, has been adapted for stage and screen, the best known being the 1951 film directed by Hitchcock. Her 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley has been adapted for film multiple times, the best known being the 1999 film, directed by Minghella. Writing under the pseudonym Claire Morgan, Highsmith published the first lesbian novel with a happy ending, The Price of Salt, in 1952, republished thirty-eight years later as Carol under her own name and later adapted into a 2015 film directed by Haynes. On February 4, 1995, Highsmith died.

The mystery of Highsmith's life leads to even greater enigmas about the woman herself in this intriguing and entertaining film. Through the director's sensitive rendering, the film gets at the weight Highsmith felt in existing in an era where she had to repress her true self and adds insight into her life, defiant final act, and downfall. Intentionally or not, the film is also very much a meditation on the sheer unlikeliness of Highsmith's celebrity. If you arrived too late on the planet to have been enamored by Highsmith's antics - she did die in 1995 after all - fear not. The joy she wrought and the outrage she often elicited is captured in this deliciously wry new documentary. The film is a compelling portrait of a pioneer, a brilliant lesbian woman who came from humble beginnings to rise to the top of the literary world on her own terms, even if those terms were ultimately her undoing.

Simon says Loving Highsmith receives:

Also, see my review for Emily the Criminal.