*** (out of ****)
Starring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote, Eriq Ebouaney, Eduoard Montoute, Rie Raasmussen, and Gregg Henry
Directed & written by Brian De Palma
2002
110 min R
Trying to describe Brian De Palma’s “Femme Fatale” in terms of plot would be to miss the point. De Palma is so cool, and “Femme Fatale” is a darkly delightful throwback to “Dressed to Kill” and his films of the 1970s. In these movies De Palma doesn’t so much tell a story as construct ideas, images, and nearly self-contained and perfect episodes, one after another, around a connecting theme. He loves all the trickery of the movies, even those sometimes considered outdated: slow motion, split screens, meticulously manipulative camera work, patience-stretching long takes, and scene after scene with minimal or no dialogue.
Here’s what we get in “Femme Fatale:” a diamond heist at the Cannes Film Festival, betrayals and double-crosses, the kidnapped wife of an ambassador, a framed photographer, guns with blanks, exotic French locations, a suitcase full of money, hoods who throw uncooperative victims in front of passing trucks, a woman with a black-eye being shadowed by a man on a motorcycle, illicit exchanges on bridges in Paris, a widow playing Russian roulette. All this woven together around the femme fatale (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos of “X-Men” and “X2”), at times jewel thief, Parisian widow, ambassador’s wife, and always the seductress. The result is like a bad dream: gauzy, hazy, meticulous, vague, drifting through tangents. What’s the point? Like all film noirs, it’s moral. We go through hell to find a piece of heaven and the lesson learned is like something out of “A Christmas Carol.”
Part of the episodic nature of “Femme Fatale” is the malleability of its title character. Is she even the same woman throughout the film? Because she is always trying to be all things to all men, to get her way, she is always changing. We’re never sure if even she knows who she was before she began seducing. She begins the film silently and goes back and forth between French and American accents. For each incarnation and episode her hairstyles and clothes are vastly different. Perhaps the purest, least diluted element of the film noir dame is that we can never really get in, past the artifice set up to please us until she gets her way. Because we are always looking at her eyes and never through them the movie’s POV is male, not just one character but an overall mindset. That’s why she’s played by an utterly unattainable supermodel, not an actress with the kind of figure you’d actually encounter in real life. (The rail-thin supermodel type doesn’t really do much for me.)
She is joined by several sharply-drawn pulp types. The noir hero is a good man who breaks his moral code once and spends the rest of the film being sucked into the quagmire while he tries to undo what he’s done. In this case, he’s a Paris photographer (Antonio Banderas), strapped for cash, who turns paparazzo for one night, and spends the rest of the movie regretting it. The ambassador (Peter Coyote) is a clean-cut American, completely out of his depth when confronted by the likes of the jewel thieves (Eriq Ebouaney and Eduoard Montoute). If anyone steals “Femme Fatale” from Romijn-Stamos it is Ebouaney, who is so palpably, monomaniacally out for his diamonds and then equally obsessed with revenge. Luckily the ambassador has a Machiavellian bodyguard (Gregg Henry) who is willing to do all the things the ambassador doesn’t know he needs done.
De Palma’s career has always been dogged by comparisons to Hitchcock. De Palma does not imitate Hitchcock, but builds on Hitch’s ideas. A simple imitator wants us to be ignorant of his master so that his borrowed ideas will seem new, but De Palma wants an audience that knows Hitchcock to better understand him. In that sense, “Femme Fatale” is the most like “Vertigo.” Both movies start over at one point, both movies contain followed women who only pretend that they are oblivious to their stalkers, both movies feature lookalikes.
My only complaint about “Femme Fatale” is that the point—the lesson we learn—is a good one, but perhaps not quite deserving of all of De Palma’s meticulousness, expertise, and precision for detail. I’m pretty sure I understood all the movie’s events, how the plot and the betrayals loop in on themselves. It’s a hard movie because we get no consistent point-of-view; there’s not one particularly reliable character through whose eyes we see everything. Banderas’ photographer comes close, but he’s only really in the second act. But maybe I need to let “Femme Fatale” stew for a while and then see it again. I didn’t quite get “Vertigo” until the second or third time I saw it.
Finished April 13, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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