Director Brian De Palma’s “Femme Fatale” opens with a women lying naked on a bed watching “Double Indemnity,” paying homage to the genre of film-noir. Film-noir thrillers contain plots as riveting as the beautiful betrayals that classically occur; the acting is as tantalizing as the actresses’ wardrobe; the camera movement is a seductive dance.
These elements work together to create a thoughtful and immensely watchable film. “Femme Fatale,” on the other hand, is confusing and overly enigmatic and thus barely watchable — the only thing left to think about is Rebecca Romijn-Stamos’ seductive dances.
Opening with the staple De Palma heist sequence, Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, “X-Men”) proceeds to betray her crew and steal a $10-million diamond bra for herself. Seeking refuge in Paris, she luckily finds her lookalike, Lily (Rebecca in a double role) in the midst of committing suicide.
Taking Lily’s identity, Ash proceeds to America where a rich politician, Bruce Hewitt Watts (Peter Coyote, “A Walk to Remember”), falls in love with her. Seven years later, at the same time her old crew is released from prison, Ash must unwillingly return to Paris as Watts becomes ambassador to France.
Aware of the danger she is in, she conceives an ill-fated plan to con her husband out of $10 million and leave paparazzi photographer Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas, “Original Sin”) as the patsy. When everything goes wrong, Ash awakens to the epiphany that life is not about manipulating others for her own gain.
The acting is far from top-notch. Romijn-Stamos fails to involve the viewer in her diabolical schemes, while Banderas seems out of focus as the paparazzo.
But in a Brian De Palma film, the actor who receives top billing is never the true star — De Palma’s star has always been the cameraman, and cinematographer Thierry Arbogast doesn’t disappoint.
Arbogast worked with De Palma to create a look reminiscent of classic film noir, using lighting and camera angles to raise a certain audience expectation, which De Palma then proceeds to deconstruct through character delineation and surreal plot twists that owe as much to Alfred Hitchcock’s techniques as they do to Luis Bunuel’s desperate surrealism.
The riveting opening scene, which is (as in De Palma’s “Snake Eyes”), the highlight of the movie, is artistically and technically satisfying, with the lucidly gliding camera and a piece by Ryuichi Sakamoto. By crosscutting the heist with the Cannes Film Festival ceremonies, De Palma immediately calls attention to the film as such, a postmodern notion serving as the leading thread to the classics.
De Palma has created another film whose main purpose is to recreate the magic of classic cinema. Yet with all these films (“Snake Eyes,” “Mission to Mars”), one crucial element is missing — a good plot that engulfs the viewer and prepares him for the betrayal that is so real it makes him want to renounce his affiliation with the human race.
There seems to be no dark elements to this film, as the only “stab in the back” is from one thief to another, who happens to be even less likeable.
“Femme Fatale” is a fairy tale film-noir. In the end, everything comes out so fantastically fine. When in life are things so perfect? More accurately, when, in a genre built on exposing the dark nature of mankind, are things so gleefully romantic?
Grade: C
