(Spoilers throughout.)
There's a point in every film where you're presented with what the protagonist has to lose. Squashed just before the halfway point, you're presented with an almost-perfect diorama, one you know the hand of the plot will mess up any second. Your character has made some gains. They've reached whatever they've been looking yearningly towards for an hour - it's either in the palm of their hand or so close they can almost touch it. Perhaps there's a cheerful montage. (I love a cheerful montage.)
For Tom Ripley and Richard Karlsen, their Things To Lose are things I would really hate to lose. Tom Ripley is just having a brilliant, brilliant time with Jude Law: on a boat, on sepia-toned cobbled streets, in a jazz bar. The bit when Law's character Dickie Greenleaf gestures for Tom to join him on stage for a sort of tasteful bit of karaoke made me realise that perhaps that's been my own life goal all along.
Richard is having a cracking time too. His beautiful girlfriend Lara is making him imagine a house, and then carefully interpreting what every feature means. They're looking at each other across a cafe table with gooey fondness in their eyes. This adolescent attention to detail is so lovely that it's what I kept thinking about for the rest of the film: two people, opposite each other, relishing even the most mundane parts of each other's brains.
