I first discovered writer Patricia Highsmith (Strangers on a Train, Carol, the five Ripley novels) as a young teenager working my way through Golders Green Library. I guess she came shortly after Georgette Heyer, and I was hooked. I only later became aware of her virulent anti-Semitism, and on this count she was not half-hearted – she called the Holocaust ‘the semicaust’ as it failed to fully deliver – yet I still could not look away. I’m the same with the spiders at the zoo: horrified, but also mesmerised. We must, I suppose, separate the art from the artist as not everyone can be Paul McCartney, but any Highsmith documentary should surely indicate that she was as disquieting and difficult and complex as the people she invented, yet Loving Highsmith refuses to go there, alas.
This documentary film is by the Swiss filmmaker Eva Vitija who wants, I think, to reframe Highsmith as a gay icon, and a romantic, with a soft side as a counterpoint to, say, the editor Otto Penzler who once described her as ‘a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being’. Vitija sets up her stall immediately by saying as the film opens: ‘Like many other filmmakers, I was drawn to her writing and when I read her unpublished diaries I fell in love with Highsmith herself.’ Not that unlovable, then..
Read the review by Deborah Ross in The Spectator.