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Rating: "A cowboy always makes an impression"
There's a scene at the beginning of the film that's emblematic: the gentle craftsman Jonathan lifts a recently finished frame and looks through it; his face seems trapped by those four lines, as if foreshadowing the scheme that will involve him.
In 1977, Wim Wenders was coming off the so-called road trilogy, so why so much interest in convincing writer Patricia Highsmith to sell the rights to one of her thrillers, Ripley's Game? Wenders still intends to somehow adapt it to his theory of movement, setting the film in a bleak Hamburg: the two protagonists, framer Jonathan Zimmerman (Bruno Ganz) is Swiss, the dealer Tom Ripley (Dennis Hopper) is American. Both are uprooted, ("I am confused...I miss home") they have their own lives but are irresistibly drawn to each other's.
Jonathan in his quiet and monotonous life is fascinated but frightened by the mysterious American's life. Tom in his large villa continues to take photographs of himself with the Polaroid and to record his voice, as if seeking confirmation of his existence, lost as he is in his disordered and purposeless life ("You are lucky, as soon as you finish a job you can see your work", he says admiringly to the framer).
The story follows the rhythms of a thriller and gangster film but overturns its connotations. Jonathan has leukemia and is constantly under medical supervision, he knows he won't live long enough to see his young wife and small child grow old. At an auction, he meets Tom Ripley, an American as we all imagine them: self-assured and with a cowboy hat, who trades in paintings but has a bad reputation. In fact, he has an agreement with New York painter Derwatt, who makes people believe he's dead to increase the value of his paintings that he continues to paint.
The discourteous meeting suggests to Ripley the idea of recommending the framer to his gangster friend Raoul Minot, who is looking for an unsuspectable person for one, maybe two murders, of competing mobsters. The gentle Jonathan, driven by alarming results of falsified medical reports, agrees to be a hitman in exchange for money to ensure a decent existence for his loved ones.
This is the start of the drama that will drive him into a dizzying escalation to become "friends" with Ripley until the tragic finale. Curiously, he is the first of Wenders' protagonists to have a home and family, "securities" ironically he ends up destroying while trying to protect them.
Wenders applies the overturning of gangster genre connotations especially in the scenes of the two murders that Jonathan will have to commit. He is a ridiculous killer, who falls asleep and lets the gun stick out from his coat, who bumps his forehead against the lamp post. In the second murder on the train, he is aided by Tom, otherwise, he wouldn't succeed, but here too the scene is played on a disorienting level: the ticket passed to the conductor from the closed toilet, the woman waiting her turn outside while inside the murder takes place, the release of the corpse from the moving train with Ripley hanging on. Again, in the final showdown, the fight in the ambulance borders on caricature among bodies bandaged like mummies and the wobbly IV drips.
This is a Wenders who is now mature, who once again, as in the previous Kings of the Road, makes a statement about cinema. If in that film he used the metaphor of a road movie, here he employs that of the classical American genre of the gangster movie: Tom Ripley is American cinema, enterprising in its awareness of attraction and power, Jonathan is the passive European spectator who, in his normality, is captivated and sucked into its fantastic dimension. No wonder Wenders for the actors deploys an entire iconography. On one side the "normal" Bruno Ganz (Jonathan), on the other Dennis Hopper (Ripley) battered from "Easy Rider" and directors Nicholas Ray (the painter Derwatt), Sam Fuller, Peter Lilienthal, Jean Eustache (the mafia gangsters).
We too are spectators and for two hours we remain immersed in Wenders' figurative universe, which this time leaves black and white for a scene dominated by a livid blue ripped by warm colors, like Jonathan's red Beetle on the beach under the gray cloudy sky, with a hallucinated Ripley humming the childish nursery rhyme... we made it, we made it....
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