FEMME FATALE (Brian de Palma, 2002) is a sexy thriller where all the women seem to look like Helmut Newton photographs, lithe, long-legged, stilettoed and wielding metaphoric whips. The men are all patsies of course. Rebecca Romijn is Laure/ Lily, the femme fatale with the dual identity. She towers Antonio Banderas (Nicolas Bardo), the main patsy, who even has a moment where he plays gay to try to fool her, and to raise questions in the audience about his character’s masculinity. . FEMME FATALE is a palpitating, glossy male projection full of desire, fear and a will to punish women. The film is framed at the beginning by the heroine, an amoral jewel thief, watching DOUBLE INDEMNITY (Billy Wilder, 1944) on TV while lounging in bed, the scene where Barbara Stanwyck says, ‘I never loved you Walter. Not you or anybody else. I’m rotten to the core. I used you…’, a sentiment which the film will dramatize over and over again. It’s beautiful to look at, fascinating to watch, until ¾ of the way through where, in a nod to THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (Fritz Lang, 1944), the whole middle section of the film turns out to have been a dream. Then the film loses its logic, stops making sense, and dissipates the very considerable sexual charge that drove the earlier parts of the film. Before we’re told it’s a dream, the movie was a gorgeous picture of hell, violent thugs, heists, sex shops, utter immorality, all spectacularly filmed; after….it becomes a repetition but with romance and poetic justice. Another of De Palma’s films I’d like to see a director’s cut of, a wonderful illustration of so much feminist literature on the femme fatale (pro and con) and a glossy, sexy watch.

José Arroyo