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Footage fetish
Brian De Palma uses Femme Fatale to indulge his erotic and stylistic obsessions. Thriller? A campy one.
By PHILIP BOOTH, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published November 7, 2002
[Photo: Warner Bros.]
Opposites attract: Antonio Banderas, as a pesky paparazzo, and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, as a jewel thief, in Femme Fatale
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Femme Fatale, an exploitative wanna-be erotic thriller from once-promising filmmaker Brian De Palma, deserves the dismissive description one critic applied to Anna Nicole Smith's inane reality show. The latest from the director of Blow Out, Body Double and The Untouchables might be thought of as a "train wreck with breasts."
The R rating, as well as the name at the top of the credits, means that female body parts will be exposed at length by a filmmaker eager to indulge his favorite fetishes -- voyeurism, surveillance, mistaken identity, showy camera tricks and self-conscious editing -- at the expense of narrative and anything resembling a sympathetic performance. It's a hymn to the triumph of style over substance.
Oddly enough, there's a palpable smugness to the thing, as if De Palma imagines that he's turning in an audaciously brilliant film, a work of twisted genius. But it's impossible to suppress laughs when a model/actor with as little screen presence as blond ice queen Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (X-Men) delivers lines such as, "I'm a bad girl, I'm a really bad girl." No, she's just a glorified video star cursed with corny dialogue.
Most annoying of all is the self-indulgent narrative device near the end of the movie. Viewers may feel cheated, and justifiably so: The sudden derailing feels cheap, as if De Palma couldn't imagine a more resourceful conclusion. The movie is more camp than cool, less like David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (an influence) than the cinematic compost of a Basic Instinct.
De Palma, perhaps feeling invincible, opens with an exchange between Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in the 1944 film-noir classic Double Indemnity. That single scene boasts an emotional wallop that two hours of Femme Fatale simply can't touch. The camera pulls back, and we notice that a half-nude woman, Laure (Romijn-Stamos) is watching the television, in a hotel room.
Moments later, a heist takes place at the Cannes Film Festival, and the sequence makes for an inventively choreographed set piece, the movie's most impressive sequence: Laure, making out with a starlet behind the glass of a bathroom stall, switches her lover's multimillion-dollar bejeweled costume for a glass imitation. The thief subsequently double-crosses her partners, including the aptly named, one-dimensional Black Tie (Eriq Ebouaney). De Palma carefully tracks the movement of a half-dozen or more witting and unwitting participants in the drama, and the action is driven by a score liberally borrowing from Ravel's Bolero.
Flash-forward seven years. Laure has landed a new identity, as the wife of a successful software designer turned political statesman (Peter Coyote, looking dazed). He's the new U.S. ambassador to France, and their return to Paris makes his spouse vulnerable to her former criminal associates, bent on revenge. Antonio Banderas, apparently having fun in a performance that flip-flops all over the place, shows up as a paparazzo unlucky enough to become a pawn in Laure's greedy game.
Those actions lead to an absurd series of events, including a sequence in a bar full of male toughies, all panting after the scantily clad Laure, and an anticlimax, located in a place best described as a parallel universe. Femme Fatale handily demonstrates that De Palma's sub-par Snake Eyes (1998) and Mission to Mars (2000) may not have been aberrations; his career, at least in artistic terms, is in free fall.
Femme Fatale
- Grade: C
- Director Brian De Palma
- Cast: Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote, Eriq Ebouaney, Edouard Montoute, Rie Rasmussen, Thierry Fremont
- Screenplay: Brian De Palma
- Rating: R; nudity, sexual situations, violence, language
- Running time: 110 min.
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