The American Friend (1977)
Directed by Wim Wenders
Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels are sickening in the best way—Tom Ripley is so charming, and so utterly without remorse, that wanting to see him succeed is a little like wanting to be caught cheating. Thus with Wenders’s adaptation, starring Dennis Hopper (not Matt Damon). Suitably psychopathic, Hopper’s Ripley lives in Hamburg, in a big neo-classical mansion he’s filled with Americana trinkets; he deals in high-art forgeries, and in the process of revenging himself on a slight, falls in buddy love with a righteous restorer (Bruno Ganz) who suffers from an unspecified and convenient (for plot purposes) blood disease. Europe, in this film, in orangey-green and perpetually under construction. Elina Mishuris (Mar 2, 7:15pm, with Wenders in person; Mar 10, 3:45pm at MoMA’s Wenders retrospective)