Everything old is noir again

Noel Vera

Just when you thought film noir was tired and over and done with,
Brian De Palma's "Femme Fatale" slinks in on its ultrahigh heels,
rubs its polished, voluptuous curves all over you, and inspires a
rousing hallelujah charge, a virtual resurrection of the genre.

The movie opens with an attempted diamond heist--not just any
diamonds, but a ten-million dollar stone-encrusted gold brassiere
that twists its way around a supermodel's breasts (Rie Rasmussen),
doing a poor job of hiding her nipples. And not on just any
occasion, but before the glitzy premiere of Regis Wargnier's "East
West," at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.

Wargnier plays himself, of course, looking worried for his missing
model, and the plot of his film (a melodrama about a Frenchwoman--
Sandrine Bonnaire, also at the premiere playing herself--going abroad
with her foreign husband) foreshadows plot elements in this film. De
Palma is up to his old tricks--self-reflexive jokes, mirrored plots,
even mirrored characters. And this in just the first few minutes...

Throw in hi-tech gadgets (a laser drill, a prehensile telescope); a
sexy-soft parody of "Bolero;" and some intricately choreographed long
takes, the serpentine nature of which mirrors the diamond bra on
everyone's mind (De Palma is one of the few filmmakers left who knows
how to create suspense, not with MTV-style quick cuts, but with mis-
en-scene and timing and menacing camera moves). And what De Palma
film isn't without its gratuitously kinky sex--here, hot lesbian
action shot through impeccably polished clouded glass, between Laure,
one of the conspirators (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), and the
aforementioned bejeweled supermodel?

Things go horribly wrong, of course--this is a De Palma film--and
Laure ends up on the run with the diamonds, her co-conspirators in
hot pursuit. Then a twist where Laure wakes up to find out she's
Lily, the daughter of an aged French couple (or is she?); then a
tense near-encounter between Laure and the real Lily (again, Romijn-
Stamos); then Laure takes over Lily's life (or does she?); and then--
seven years later! Lily comes back to France with her now-husband,
Ambassador Watts (Peter Coyote). The opening being set in 2001, De
Palma jumps some five or six years into the future, pushing the film
into the realm of science fiction. Or does he?

It's De Palma's umpteenth homage to Alfred Hitchcock's "Vertigo"
(about a woman who "dies" and the double who takes her place); he
must really love the film, he's remade it at least three
times: "Obsession," "Blow Out," "Body Double." Throw in his homage
to Hitchcock's "Rear Window" (not to mention Michelangelo
Antonioni's "Blow Up"), in the form of Antonio Banderas' Nicolas
Bardo, an unemployed photographer with a spectacular apartment view
and an uneasy conscience. Bardo was assigned to take pictures of the
American ambassador's camera-shy French wife; now he has to deal with
her mysterious and apparently violent husband, while she has to deal
with her former partners from the long-ago heist, who have seen
Bardo's photograph of her. Men follow man following man following
woman, who has them all on the palm of her hand. Or does she?

As Laure or Lily, Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is impossibly beautiful, a
Vogue magazine cover come to long-legged life. She shouldn't be that
interesting (models are usually a bore), only De Palma seems to catch
her face at unguarded moments, and enough spirited young woman shines
through to charm; that, plus a scene of her getting dirty thrills out
of two men battering each other groggy won me over. As Bardo,
Banderas shows that he's best when frazzled. He seems more relaxed
and funny and appealing than he has in years playing De Palma's
favorite hero, the cynical techno-geek with a hidden heart of gold.
The rest of the cast seems, well, well cast, though Coyote feels sort
of wasted.

It's wonderfully unwholesome entertainment, the kind of trash you
enjoy more in the dark and alone, before sneaking home in your
raincoat. At the same time the film has a unique thrill of its own--
watching De Palma stumble, as he has in so many of his previous
films, over the intricacies of the various games he's playing, and at
the last moment turning stumble into somersault. The whole film
feels like that, a series of stumbles turned one long somersault,
perhaps the most intricate and perversely sustained (I almost gave up
on the picture not once, but several times) in recent memory, to end
with De Palma flagrantly violating one of noir's most fundamental
quality--its fatalism. It's as if he was looking over the new
generation of smart-alecky visual stylists, relatively younger guns
like Quentin Tarantino, Luc Besson, Guy Richie, Christopher Nolan,
the Wachowski and Coen Brothers, and saying: "Children--see, this is
how you really do it..."

First appeared in Businessworld 1.31.03

(Comments? Email me at noelbotevera@...)