"Femme Fatale"

That theme -- the division between reality and image -- has grown increasingly important for De Palma. His last three movies, "Mission: Impossible" "Snake Eyes," and "Mission to Mars," were, I think, all concerned with how we see, and particularly how we watch movies. He is obsessed with reminding us that information is not the same thing as knowledge. "Snake Eyes" opened with an unbroken 19-minute tracking shot that laid out the plot. The rest of the movie was a demonstration of why everything we had seen in that sequence was a lie. The opening sequence of "Mission: Impossible" showed us Tom Cruise's crew of agents being picked off one by one. We had already seen each of those murders, though, in nearly subliminal blips during the movie's credit sequence (information without knowledge). The criminally maligned "Mission to Mars" contained meditations on the inability of cameras to faithfully record reality that were comparable to similar musings in the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Chris Marker.

We are constantly being misled in "Femme Fatale." De Palma drops only the slyest hints, such as a quick glimpse of Millais' famous painting of Ophelia, to clue us in to what's actually going on. All of his familiar visual trademarks are here -- the slow motion, the split screen, the prevalence of cameras (photographers are everywhere in the movie). And so are his motifs of doubling, of division and melding. It's a playful movie, but De Palma's technique is its own sort of meat, so far beyond what other directors are capable of that their most sincere movies can seem like trifles in comparison. Befitting a director who keeps reminding us how easily our eyes can deceive us, "Femme Fatale" is a demonstration of the seductiveness of surfaces.

It's a ravishing-looking movie. Using Luc Besson's cinematographer, Thierry Arbogast, De Palma renders Paris as the meeting place of traditional European elegance and cold high-tech. It's an autumnal-looking movie heated by a low, steady smolder. It's also one of the great clothes movies of all time. Among the designers who contributed to the movie are Valentino, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Dolce & Gabbana, Thierry Mugler, Prada, Yves Saint-Laurent, Chanel and Jean-Charles de Castelbajac. When De Palma switches into slow motion for a chase sequence, it might be so he can admire the trademark red soles of a fleeing woman's Christian Louboutin boots.

Considering that women have so often been the victims in De Palma's movies, it might seem odd for him to make a movie where the femme is fatale. But the charges of misogyny that feminists have loved to lob at him ignored the fact that De Palma's sympathies were always with the women. His great recurring theme of tortured male chivalry, the man who is unable to save the woman, reflected a deep ambivalence about traditional masculinity (and the way the movies have taught us to worship it). That theme underwent a grand twist in "Mission to Mars," where the man had to sacrifice himself in order to save the women. And I wonder how many people will notice that, in "Femme Fatale," women save the lives of other women again and again. Among the things he's playing with here is the archetypal noir figure of the killer woman.

De Palma winds up giving us a reason to like Rebecca Romijn-Stamos's Laure, though he doesn't need to. Goody-goody heroines have never fared well on screen, and Laure is so deliciously bad that she wins our hearts immediately. "I'm a bad, bad girl," she says to Banderas at one point, and we're in no position to argue. De Palma is obviously using Romijn-Stamos here for her gorgeous looks, the slightly wide mouth, and the hint of mischief in her eyes that keeps her from being a bland all-American beauty. Swaddled in furs and a scarf, she can look like Kim Novak in "Vertigo." Kitted out in leather and sublimely slinky La Perla undies, she's the baddest hooch-bar hottie.

It would be a mistake, though, to think of Romijn-Stamos as strictly a stunning camera subject. There's a fearless bravado to this performance, an unselfconscious willingness to be naughty and sexy and provocative in a way that more established actresses, conscious of their public image, might avoid. Laure is in charge and Romijn-Stamos isn't scared to wield that authority. She gets a charge from it. She manages some parodic fun when Laure, a great con woman in addition to a great thief, plays a French fille in distress (it also ties right in to De Palma's loathing of the sap movies push on us). When she laughs in delight as two men beat each other up over her, she's the naughtiest kitten imaginable. Romijn-Stamos matches up perfectly with Banderas, who proves once again that he's at his sexiest when he's being funny (and that he's never more endearing than when he's being besieged). Their encounters have real heat, and the way she takes charge of the situation is marvelously raunchy. (It's a neat joke that she's taller than he is.)

The affection De Palma shows Romijn-Stamos here has to do with her being the on-screen equivalent of the role he has long played behind the camera: a trickster. It's in the movie's climax that De Palma shows just how much of a trickster he can be. Among other things, the finale is a joke on the twist endings that some recent hits have foisted, straight-faced, on their audiences. He includes an uncharacteristically sentimental scene only to give it a deadly little fillip in what follows.

De Palma has said that he thinks part of the reason "Mission to Mars" fared so poorly with critics and audiences was because people couldn't accept optimism from him. Here, he's found a way to combine optimism with the slyness that is his forte. De Palma gives us a happy ending that is also one of his great sick jokes. Maybe that's the type of happy ending closest to his heart. In any event, you couldn't be blamed for purring with contentment. In the world of "Femme Fatale," we're all naughty kitty cats.

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