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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and Antonio Banderas are hot and cool in Brian De Palma's sexy, tricky and sinfully glamorous Parisian confection.
Nov 6, 2002 | Movies are never so much fun as when they contain an element of the disreputable. The appeal of cheap, trashy movies, with their fantasies of sex and violence, is that they lure us in with the promise of the pleasurable forbidden. A lurid and colorful Italian horror movie, a slick piece of Eurotrash exploitation, a shoot'em-up from Korea or Hong Kong can go directly to our pleasure center in ways that worthy, virtuous, dull movies can't. Movies can of course be so much more than genre and exploitation pictures. But there's an immense, nearly sexual satisfaction in movies that haven't lost touch with the tawdry sources that give movies their particular, visceral energy.
A master of the medium who exults in trickery and sex appeal, Brian De Palma takes the stuff of cheap movies and invests them with a wicked luster. In his dazzling and luxuriant new thriller "Femme Fatale," De Palma turns trash into chic. It's a sexy, violent, glamorous, sinfully funny movie with a surface as hard and brilliant as diamonds. De Palma has never been shy about putting his sex fantasies on screen. The sensual possibilities of movies get him buzzing with excitement, and he doesn't hesitate to indulge his own rapturous voyeurism -- or to encourage ours.
De Palma delights in giving his kinky daydreams the most chic settings imaginable. Here, it's Paris (where the director has lived for several years). Watching "Femme Fatale" is like being given a plush, comfy seat at the swankiest peep show in town. It's a supremely relaxing turn-on. You sink into the luxury of the movie even as you're watching in anticipation to see where it will go next. It's easy to imagine De Palma eager to get to the set each day to unleash some sinuous camera move, to hear an actor deliver an outlandish piece of dialogue, to devise new ways of pulling the rug out from under the audience.
Yet his technique is the opposite of flashy. De Palma has been making movies for 40 years now, and he's never stopped developing and transforming his favorite devices -- split screen, slow motion, cameras that prowl the sets in long, unbroken shots. The confidence he has long shown has only deepened with each new movie. He has mastered the assurance that is the true mark of sophisticated moviemaking. In "Femme Fatale" De Palma is comparable to the sly prankster Luis Buñuel proved himself to be in "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie." De Palma makes a joke of our gullibility and gets us to laugh at how easy it is to be suckered -- and how much fun it is.
"Femme Fatale"
Written and directed by Brian De Palma
Starring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote
"Femme Fatale" makes the link to movie-fed fantasies explicit from the get-go. The picture's first shot is the femme fatale of the title, Laure (Rebecca Romjin-Stamos), reflected in a TV set watching the apotheosis of femme fatales, Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity." When the curtains of her hotel room open, we're looking out onto the red carpet as stars arrive for the gala opening of the Cannes Film Festival. Laure is part of a gang of thieves who are aiming to steal a jewel-encrusted serpent that a sleek model (Rie Rasmussen) is wearing to the festival as a barely-there halter top. (With that gold serpent curling around her torso, Rasmussen is like Eve reimagined for a Vogue layout.)
Of course, things don't go as planned, and Laure winds up on the run from her partners. She resurfaces as Lily, the French wife of an American ambassador (Peter Coyote). A tabloid editor who has noticed that no one has a picture of Lily hires Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas), a deeply in-debt photographer, to obtain one. He does, and Laure/Lily sets out to salvage her cover.
It would be spoiling the fun to describe any more of the plot than that, except to say it operates on a very high level of game playing. "Femme Fatale" has a generic noirish title, but its naughty sense of fun and of the sexiness of danger winds up making most noir seem rather prim. The sentimentality of noir derives from the cruel twists of fate suffered by the losers and no-accounts who populate the genre. De Palma is too much of a satirist to easily give himself over to the doomed romantic fatalism of noir (though when he did, in "Carlito's Way," he came close to making the "Casablanca" of his generation). He uses noir conventions to make a grand joke about fate, to find yet another way of upsetting the audience's expectations, something in which he has specialized.
De Palma's grand jokes are not always to everyone's taste, of course. The nasty ends De Palma has devised for some of his characters (especially the characters with whom we've been made to identify) have struck some moviegoers as indiscriminate meanness. I would argue that for thrillers to be truly effective, we have to have a sense of our own vulnerability. Part of making audiences feel that vulnerability is making them aware of how movie conventions have always spared the good and innocent. "Femme Fatale" is the first movie he's made in which fate can not only be cruel but also fortuitous, as liable to deliver a windfall as a disaster.
If the confident tone, which is both cooled down and heated up, sometimes seems to make the movie less urgent than we expect a thriller to be, we're never bored because De Palma's command of moviemaking provides its own kind of suspense. We're accustomed to De Palma's providing his movies with knockout openings, and "Femme Fatale" is no exception. The jewel heist, which involves a steamy seduction, a good, corrupt security guard, and a mischievous kitty cat, is laid out like a mosaic with the various elements coming inexorably together.
"Femme Fatale" is itself something of a mosaic. The photo collage that Banderas' Nicolas assembles out of snapshots of the Parisian street his apartment overlooks (it looks rather like David Hockney's experiments in photo collage) is a visual metaphor for the movie -- an overview assembled out of bits and pieces. In one of the movie's most breathtaking shots we see a split screen of the actual street next to Nicolas' collage. It's a neat metaphor for the split between art and life, between what we think we see and what's actually there.
