Sunny place, dark tale

The Talented Mr Ripley (15) General release

The Talented Mr Ripley (15) General release

The subject of five novels by the late Patricia Highsmith, the amoral character of Tom Ripley was introduced by her in 1955 in The Talented Mr Ripley, filmed four years later by Rene Clement as Plein Soleil with the handsome young Alain Delon in the role of Ripley. In the first overtly gay screen treatment of a Highsmith novel, Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning writer-director of The English Patient, addresses subject matter which even French cinema dared not address directly 40 years ago, in his riveting new version, The Talented Mr Ripley.

This handsome and gripping suspense drama of duplicity and deception features Matt Damon in a riveting performance as Tom Ripley, an insecure but ambitious young American. Mr Ripley's talent is for deceit, impersonation and opportunism as he reinvents himself, chameleon-like, to appease his social-climbing and sexual desires. "I'd rather be a fake somebody," he says, "than a real nobody."

It opens in the summer of 1958 when Ripley, mistaken for a Princeton alumnus, is despatched to Italy by a wealthy shipbuilder, Herbert Greenleaf (James Redhorn) to persuade his indolent son, the attractive, narcissistic Dickie (Jude Law) to return home. Arriving in Mongibello, south of Naples, the ostensibly gauche Ripley inveigles his way into the lives of Dickie and his American girlfriend, Marge (Gwyneth Paltrow).

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He finds himself irresistibly drawn to their sybaritic lifestyle of sailing, sunbathing, touring, parties and jazz clubs. And as he methodically ingratiates himself into their alluring world, the probably virginal Ripley becomes deeply sexually attracted to Dickie. The more Ripley lies, the greater the accumulating risks he sets for himself in this fascinatingly drawn picture of a compulsive, perfectionist liar whose greatest fear, it emerges, is in facing himself.

Atmospherically photographed by John Seale, the sunny period backdrop to this dark tale is evocatively caught in Minghella's astutely radical yet essentially faithful reworking of Highsmith's novel, which makes bountiful use of its Italian locations and the authentic period detail achieved by art director, Roy Walker and costume designers Ann Roth and Gary Jones.

Most unfairly overlooked in last week's Oscar nominations, Matt Damon's acute, subtle and commendably adventurous performance precisely captures Ripley in all his confusions and contradictions, and Damon also acquits himself impressively as a singer in an Italian night-club sequence where he performs - almost whispers - My Funny Valentine in the style of Chet Baker.

Jude Law - whose strutting, arrogant Bosie was the only credible creation in the recent Wilde - has deservedly received an Oscar nomination for his sharp, engaging portrayal of the insouciant but instinctually shrewd Dickie. Gwyneth Paltrow as Marge and Cate Blanchett, playing a character devised by Minghella for the film, are fine within the limitations of their roles in a fine cast that also features Jack Davenport and Philip Baker Hall, and the scene-stealing Philip Seymour Hoffman, superb as the supercilious snob, Freddie, who is Dickie's closest friend.

Open Your Eyes/Abre Los Ojos (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

There is a good deal more to Open Your Eyes than meets the eye initially in this complex psychological drama written and directed with firm confidence by one of the bright young talents of Spanish cinema, Alejandro Amenabar, who made it in 1977, when he was 25. It is his second feature, following Thesis, which swept the boards at the annual Spanish cinema awards, the Goyas, two years earlier.

The pivotal character of Open Your Eyes, which is set in Madrid, is, like Dickie Greenleaf in The Talented Mr Ripley, a handsome, vain and self-absorbed young man - the 25-year-old Cesar (Eduardo Noriega),who has inherited a fortune from his deceased parents. He drops women once he has slept with them, and he has no sooner spent a night with the obsessively interested Nuria (Najwa Nimri from Lovers of the Arctic Circle) than he is attempting to seduce the attractive Sofia (Penelope Cruz, who was the pregnant nun in All About My Mother).

From that premise, director Amenabar draws the viewer into a complex, time-shifting web which blurs the lines between dreams, fears, fantasies and reality - and virtual reality - and between past, present and future. The stranger it seems the more intriguing it becomes, demanding the patience and sustained attention of the audience as it unfolds.

A strong payoff in the resolution should be the audience's reward, and ultimately Amenabar doesn't deliver entirely satisfyingly in this regard. He is clearly a film-maker of considerable promise, however, and Open Your Eyes is certainly a visually arresting film which is accompanied by a fine, sweeping score - co-written by the versatile Amenabar - whose resonances with Bernard Herrmann's work for Hitchcock aptly complement the movie's explicit references to Vertigo. Incidentally, the remake rights to Open Your Eyes have been bought by Tom Cruise for his production company, while Jim Sheridan has acquired the remake rights to Amenabar's earlier Thesis.

Rosetta (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin

At Cannes last year, as the closing night awards ceremony trundled on, jaws dropped all over the Festival Palais as the jury gave nothing to any of the seven English-language films in competition, gave all three of the night's acting awards to non-professionals, and spread five major awards over two resolutely bleak and austere European movies, Rosetta and L'Humanite.

Written and directed by brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Rosetta, the Belgian film which won the Palme d'Or, was the last of the competition films to be shown at the festival and had been greeted by polite applause - and a few dozen walk-outs. Made with a rough, hand-held energy, it follows the humiliations experienced by the 18-year-old Rosetta as she struggles to hold down one poorlypaid job after another. Shot in a de-saturated colour scheme against a grim industrial backdrop, and employing an editing style that reflects Rosetta's edginess, it captures the emptiness and hopelessness of her life in the trailer park where she lives with and regularly rebukes her alcoholic mother. And it establishes how, at 18, Rosetta is so hardened by life that she responds to the one person who offers her any affection by betraying him and almost allowing him to drown.

This is the second feature film - after La Promesse, which went unreleased here - from the Dardenne brothers whose prolific output in the area of documentaries has produced over 60 films. That experience in non-fiction film-making is evident in the unflinching realism of Rosetta, a film quite uncompromising in its depiction of a harsh life of desperation and disappointment.

While it is unquestionably sincere in its social concerns, the film rarely exerts the dramatic power employed by Ken Loach, in particular, in chronicling the experiences of the marginalised in society. Rosetta is a gritty and credible, although unduly repetitive, picture which might well have deserved a minor prize at Cannes - but to give it both the Palme d'Or and the best actress award (to Emilie Dequenne, the non-professional who plays Rosetta) was to overstate its achievements.