Lov­ing Highsmith

To say that Patri­cia High­smith is a con­tro­ver­sial fig­ure is an under­state­ment. The bril­liant nas­ti­ness of her crime thrillers has led to an ongo­ing and insa­tiable appetite for film adap­ta­tions. From Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951) to Antho­ny Minghella’s The Tal­ent­ed Mr Rip­ley (1999), from René Clément’s Pur­ple Noon (1960) to Adri­an Lyne’s Deep Water (2022).

Yet that nas­ti­ness was not restrict­ed to fic­tion. Any one of her three biogra­phies records her racism, par­tic­u­lar­ly a caus­tic seam of anti-semi­tism. With this image cal­ci­fy­ing in the pub­lic domain, it is no mean feat that Swiss direc­tor, Eva Viti­ja, has suc­ceed­ed in com­pli­cat­ing our under­stand­ing of High­smith with an inti­mate docu-por­trait that strives not to be defin­i­tive, rather to rig­or­ous­ly carve a per­son­al the­sis out of pri­ma­ry research. 

High­smith kept pri­vate diaries and note­books from the age of 21 to sev­er­al years before her death at 74, amount­ing to 8,000 hand­writ­ten pages, pub­lished in 2021 in an abridged form. Viti­ja had ear­ly access to the full source through the Swiss Lit­er­ary Archives and has sup­ple­ment­ed these archival rich­es with her own inde­pen­dent detec­tive work, con­duct­ing inter­views with sur­viv­ing fam­i­ly mem­bers and key lovers from Highsmith’s sex­u­al­ly vora­cious life. The charms that enabled High­smith here cast a spell on Viti­ja too. ​“When I start­ed read­ing her unpub­lished diaries, I fell in love with Patri­cia High­smith herself”.

To those com­ing to the film with a set image of a cold mis­an­thrope, the pas­sion­ate emo­tion of the diary entries are as star­tling and plea­sur­able as sink­ing your body into a hot tub in mid-win­ter. Born to a moth­er who did not love her and tried to force her to mar­ry a man against the grain of her les­bian desires, High­smith entered ther­a­py in an attempt to con­vert her­self to heterosexuality. 

This bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion is scat­tered light­ly around the main meat of the film which, as the title sug­gests, is ded­i­cat­ed to those that loved her, if only briefly. Exes to add their tes­ti­monies include fel­low icon­ic US les­bian author, Mar­i­jane Meak­er (who wrote under the pen names Ann Aldrich, M. E. Kerr, Mary James, Vin Pack­er and Lau­ra Win­ston) as well as the Ger­man actress and cre­ative poly­math, Tabea Blumenschein.

Each vignette is illus­trat­ed with a trans­port­ing selec­tion of old pho­tos, audio and TV footage, with diary entries read by Gwen­do­line Christie and Vitija’s own first-per­son nar­ra­tion bind­ing a pati­na of mem­o­ries togeth­er. As High­smith ages, bit­ter­ness and resent­ment hard­en into place. She writes of tumul­tuous dis­ap­point­ments, ​“My life is a chron­i­cle of unbe­liev­able mis­takes, things I shouldn’t have done and vice versa.” 

This is not – and does not try to be – an exhaus­tive biog­ra­phy, it is a form of emo­tion­al impres­sion­ism that works because Viti­ja under­stands the bound­aries of her project and keeps a focus on illus­trat­ing her vision in the most vivid, high-qual­i­ty colours. Fig­ures like High­smith com­mand our fas­ci­na­tion because they are essen­tial­ly unknow­able. After all, the cre­ator of com­pul­sive­ly grub­by crime nov­els, also gave us the over­pow­er­ing romance of Car­ol. It is tempt­ing to want peo­ple to be one thing or the oth­er: the mur­der­er or the vic­tim. This film reminds us: High­smith was both.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, month­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.