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Bartholomew's Replies
I think Freddy sent it himself because he really wanted to help Naz.
A guard probably reviewed the security footage as a routine part of their job. Knowing that Naz was Freddy's boy, they told him. When Freddy somehow heard how badly Chandra's decision to put Naz on the witness stand had backfired, he asked the guard to burn the footage to disc.
I thought the opposite. If Dickie is such a night-life-loving playboy, why did he choose to live in such a quiet backwater? It made more sense for the Dickie of the novel and the miniseries who wanted to focus on his painting.
It was probably no more than a few weeks later. Dickie was interviewed by Ravini for the second time on January 16th, and he failed to return from Palermo on the 28th. Ravini likely held the press conference to announce his disappearance a few days later. Ripley, having just settled in Venice, read the papers and went to the police station on the following day. If Ripley deliberately 'missed' the coverage of that press conference and claimed to only see a later story, then it would have been at most 7 weeks later because the party he attended was on March 10th.
Still, I don't think I'd remember the voice of someone I'd spoken with only briefly a few weeks prior. And as English was Ravini's 2nd or 3rd language, the most memorable aspect of Dickie's and Tom's voices for him would likely have been the accent. It wouldn't surprise him that both sounded "Americano".
This adaptation is by far the most faithful to the novel, and, in my opinion, is also the best of the three. The 1999 version was enjoyable, but it just didn't have the time to get into the details of the story. It also wasted some of its running time with added characters and subplots that were not in the novel.
I thought the Italian architecture looked spectacular in b&w!
While the PI is accusing Tom, the camera angle changes from Tom's POV to the PI's POV and back several times. From Tom's POV, the PI is shown in pretty tight shots, from the elbows up and then head and shoulders only. Tom, by contrast, is shown from the PI's view in slightly wider shots, which makes him appear small and vulnerable by comparison (a technique that Caravaggio apparently used as well).
The close framing on the PI also gives the impression that they are in a confined space. More significantly, behind the PI is a blank surface with a pattern of intense light and shadow as if cast by sunlight streaming down through the bars of a prison window.
Afterwards, the framing changes to over-the-shoulder shots which are much more balanced. The framing is much wider and you can see that they are in a very large room, there is no blank surface behind the PI, and there is no source of light that would have cast those shadows.
Calum planning to kill himself doesn't seem to really jibe with him telling Sophie that she can always confide in him, or with him getting upset about the dropped mask and attempting to dive after it. He was suicidal, but not in the sense of actively killing himself. Instead, he seemed to no longer care whether he lived or died, tempting fate by standing on the balcony railing and by crossing the street without looking (not even when the oncoming bus honked at him). My guess is that he died "accidentally" due to complete disregard for his own safety.
I took the rave scenes as a dream Sophie had, because the scene of her sitting up in bed immediately followed one of the rave sequences. Unlike the other rave scenes, that one was accompanied by the sound of panicky breathing. One of the last memories she had of her dad was of dancing together, and he had previously told her that he loved to dance.
In Sophie's dream he was wearing the same clothes as at the airport, suggesting that was the last time she saw him, but I don't think he necessarily died in Turkey. If he hadn't died, they might not have seen each other again until her Christmas break, so I think he could have died weeks or months following the trip.
Calum was reckless with his life at times, such as standing on the balcony railing and crossing the street without looking, right in front of a bus. My hunch is that he did not actively take his own life but instead tempted fate once too often.