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***** QUEER THURSDAYS & NOVEMBER: RIPLEY *****The 1999 film may have more direct moments of Ripley lusting after men, but nothing tops the sheer flamboyance of John Malkovich’s portrayal of the character in middle age. A beret-wearing art forger who has settled down in Italy with his beard wife Luisa (Chiara Caselli), Malkovich’s Ripley is almost always filmed wearing a cravat, even while riding a bicycle around his meticulously decorated villa. Based on the third Highsmith novel in the series, this film has perhaps the gayest premise of all time: an acquaintance slights Ripley at a party and so Ripley decides to destroy his entire life, in this case by pressuring him into a murder-for-hire scheme. But when he’s not garroting mobsters in a train car, this Ripley can’t help but ooze homosexual. He’s shown sewing in a robe while perched on red silk sheets and baking a soufflé that prompts Luisa to label him “the perfect housewife.” But this Ripley’s most iconic and Exclusively Gay Moment™ comes when someone asks him “Who are you?” to which he quickly responds “I’m a creation.” If that’s not a Drag Race entrance line, I don’t know what is.
***** NOVEMBER: RIPLEY *****
Who is the gayest version of Ripley ever put on screen? Given the (…) TV series, and all the Saltburn-adjacent interest in homoerotic class climbing in a dark academia setting, I have been immersing myself in the Ripley-verse to find out if we’ve been sleeping on any of the lesser known portrayals. None of these movies are officially connected to each other, and some of them present radically different versions of the character, but they all treat us to the simple pleasures of watching a handsome man do terrible things. You might think the bathtub scene in the ’99 version is about as queer as Ripley can get (and yes, Saltburn’s bathtub scene was almost certainly inspired by that one), but that’s not necessarily the case.
(Samantha Allen, Them)
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Hypnos Theatre, Norra Grängesbergsgatan 15, SE-214 50 Malmö, Sverige, Malmö, Sweden
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.
