DVD/Film Review: FEMME FATALE *** (out of 5)
The heist of some rare diamonds during the Cannes Film Festival goes horribly wrong, and not necessarily by accident.
There are three kinds of Brian De Palma movies: first there’s…well, Brian De Palma Movies, peculiar, idiosyncratic films in which the director is the star, movies that swim in style and pastiche and an almost overwhelming love of cinema for its own sake; then there are Brian-Needs-the-Money Movies, big budget, all-star Hollywood productions that have little to do with De Palma’s usual concerns, and that have often resulted in jaw-dropping, spectacular misfires like The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990) and pure, wrong-headed show biz flubs like Mission to Mars (2000); and finally, there’s The Untouchables (1987), which was a Brian-Needs-the-Money movie that, somehow, went spectacularly right.
His latest film, Femme Fatale, falls solidly in the first category, an unabashed Brian De Palma Movie that overflows with so much visual style and lyricism it approaches symphonic dissolution, an outrageous practical joke wrapped inside a conundrum cloaked in the mercurial genre of film noir. Femme Fatale is maddeningly improbable, relentlessly slippery, baldly indebted to Hitchcock and Antonioni, and to David Lynch of all people, and to who-knows-who else, including De Palma himself, and it’s actually quite a good time, his best entertainment since The Untouchables and his best film in his own private, professorial genre since Dressed to Kill (1980).
Femme Fatale is an almost impossible tangle of events and moments which play on common audience assumptions, particularly the idea that we know — or more to the point, are able to know — what is going on around us. It is a key element of film noir, and of noir fiction in general, or as the great pulp writer Jim Thompson once put it, “There is only one story: nothing is what it seems.”
As a practical theory of storytelling, Thompson’s admonition could almost sum up De Palma’s career; he may be the most gleefully unreliable narrator in American movies. From his groundbreaking indie film Sisters (1973) to the box-office conquering Mission: Impossible (1996), even Brian-Needs-the-Money movies are sure to have one or more sequences in which the narrative veers without warning onto some new, disorienting and objective track, and savvy audience members may come to the uneasy conclusion that they’ve just been along for the ride since the beginning.
It’s easy to spot the Hitchcockian influence in De Palma’s outstanding camera work, his puzzling situations filled with elaborate action and quiet mysteries, and his literal stalking of his characters with a camera, sometimes for minutes on end. But the page De Palma really snatched from Hitchcock‘s book turns out to be a constant exploration of moviegoing itself as a form of voyeurism, a theme upon which he’s been working endless variations for decades. It’s no mistake that Vertigo (1958) is De Palma’s favorite film to quote, with its seemingly endless tracking shots of a detective-as-audience-surrogate, following and observing a suspect with whom he finds himself falling in love.
De Palma continually announces himself, like a sly carnival barker drawing us into his seedy tent with the promise of seeing all kinds of forbidden fruits — a packed shower in the girl’s locker room, a frustrated housewife boinking a stranger in a taxi, a pair of half naked super models groping each other in a Cannes powder room — only to raise the curtain on a world we’d rather not contemplate, full of people planning and doing very bad things to each other, and implicating us in the dirty deeds with our own urge to spy on strangers and neighbors. No other director of the moment is so conscious of the audience as a major participant in the movie-going experience, or so fascinated with film as a peep show, a surreptitiously moving, changing window to which we obsessively return, hoping to find some sort of redemptive projection of ourselves, or at the very least some juicy, private moment that is usually kept hidden.
Femme Fatale delivers ten-fold on all of these promises, though it is a narrative shambles. As the title suggests, the film has a noir plot through and through, piling narrative twist upon turn upon twist in an absurdity of double-crosses and neon red herrings, intricate shams and bizarre coincidence, fatal ennui and ego-piercing dialogue, and camp moments so ballsy no one but De Palma would dare to put them in a contemporary movie. But the whole idea of a plot becomes nonsense after awhile, and the point is no longer who did what to whom, or why, but just how many bravura sequences this star director can weave together and sustain for the sheer joy of filmmaking. Femme Fatale’s answer is: very many.
The first 45 minutes of the movie are virtually silent, save for a purposely overbearing score that steals shamelessly from Ravel’s “Bolero,” while De Palma’s elegantly staged Steadicam shots weave in and out and around a thoroughly frustrating heist, revealing only what suits him, toying with our desire to know what is going on without ever actually revealing anything we need to know, like a practiced lover who knows all the right spots to touch without ending anything too soon. That is, the film’s opening is like its title character Laure, who appears to be able to seduce anyone, of any erotic persuasion, within ten seconds of hello.
To bring out that side of Laure, statuesque Rebecca Romijn-Stamos doesn’t have to work very hard; her allure is self-evident, the camera has always loved her. But De Palma has given her a few extra dramatic hoops to jump through in this film and she clears them easily, believably turning on the waterworks when she needs to melt a skeptical heart, often playing Laure with a jarring sense of humor and an unsettling grasp of how lust can short-circuit the brain’s logic centers, if you have the right mask. Her strip tease in a Parisian pool hall, pitting two dim-witted suitors against each other, is a knee-slapping show stopper, the funniest highlight of a constantly surprising film.
Which is not to say that Femme Fatale is any kind of meaningful drama; it’s all artifice, an exultantly mounted trash aria. It seems De Palma is in an unusually breezy mood these days, and it sits well with his insistence on an excess of style over substance. There has always been a certain amount of winking in a Brian De Palma Movie, but in this film it infuses every scene.
The welcome tone is helped along immensely by Antonio Banderas, in a charming performance as a camera-toting paparazzi with more enthusiasm than wiles, and by the outstanding cinematography of Thierry Arbogast (Luc Besson’s constant collaborator), who brings a rich palette of light and glamour to the film’s Gallic fantasy world.
Femme Fatale
written & directed by Brian De Palma; director of photography, Thierry Arbogast; edited by Bill Pankow; music by Ryuichi Sakamoto
with: Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (Laure/Lily), Antonio Banderas (Nicolas Bardo), Peter Coyote (Watts)
1 hr., 50 m.; Warner Bros. Pictures, rated R
DVD release date: 3/25/03
Notes:
NICE TWIST: Hollywood may have created film noir, a genre that many American critics agree first crystallized with Double Indemnity (1944), but the French named it, when fifties-era cineastes like François Truffaut began spotting certain recurring themes and motifs in a cluster of American movies made during WWII. De Palma, keenly aware that he’s taking film noir home, opens Femme Fatale in a Cannes hotel room, with his protagonist watching Double Indemnity in bed, and then proceeds to set the entire film in France.
CAMEOS: Many prominent figures of the French film industry appear as themselves, including director Régis Wargnier (Indochine, 1992; East-West, 1999) and actress Sandrine Bonnaire (À nos amours, 1983 and Wargnier’s East-West).
THERE IS ANOTHER: De Palma’s second favorite film to quote is Michelangelo Antonioni’s highly influential Blowup (1966), in which a morally bankrupt fashion photographer discovers he has captured a murder on film while taking random pictures in a park. The polar opposite of a Hitchcock thriller, Blowup’s protagonist is an enigmatic vessel for a film about modern apathy, a search for clues that ultimately lead nowhere. Antonioni’s films are characterized by hypnotic camerawork, a symbolic use of color, and misguided quests for identity that dissolve in a general cultural malaise.
THE SIGNATURE: De Palma only steals from the best, but he does have one cinematic signature that is all his, the extended split-screen sequence, often showing us two different points of view simultaneously. He is marvelously adept with the device, and his use of it in this film will be totally lost if you rent the “full screen,” pan-and-scan version.
Eric Barker is a writer and independent filmmaker living in Denver.
