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 over 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.
Neil Jackson has written a lovely piece on the film, differing in his estimation of the dream/vision device to mine, which is worth quoting at length:
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True to form, De Palma has infused the film with Hitchcockian allusions, as well as a more than cursory nod to Antonioni’s Blow Up (the shadow of which loomed large over De Palma’s own Blow Out). The high-tech trappings continue De Palma’s ongoing commentary on both the ramifications of surveillance culture, with images repeatedly evoked through the lenses of still and video cameras, night vision goggles and binoculars. Complementing the murderous, matrimonial and sexual pursuit of the eponymous figure by several of the film’s male characters, the film showcases De Palma’s familiar theme of sound and image technology, which has become the ultimate adjunct to personal obsession. In tandem, De Palma has upped the ante by aligning the play on images with a dream narrative, albeit one that comes complete with ‘seven years later’ captions, split-screen effects and subtitled French.
While much of the film gleefully baits those who accuse its director of stylistic overkill, there is a curious logic at play, even while the film seems to simultaneously go into orbit. All the signs that the audience is being led on a merry dance are there: surreal details such as the bloodied shirt still worn by a character shot seven years previously; the repeated emphasis on flowing water; and the clocks that all seem permanently stuck at 3.33. Also, many of the major characters in the mid-section are dream ‘echoes’ of figures glimpsed fleetingly during the heist and escape opening. Characters are frequently visualised through split screens or frames within the frame, grounding them in a rigorously sustained artificiality. The pivotal image comes following a jump-cut from the apparent suicide of Laure’s (Rebecca Romijn Stamos) doppelganger – momentarily filling the screen is what appears to be a giant swirling quotation mark, which is actually the design pattern on a jetliner engine.’
It’s a film that some devoted de Palma fans have listed as their favourite.
José Arroyo
