It may simply have mystified and exasperated some people. It takes some wild risks. Whether they pay off or not is something you will have to decide. It depends on your tolerance for thrillers that break the rules.
The most important aspect of this movie is the one that can’t even be hinted at. You do not want to read any spoilers for Femme Fatale. I am not going to offer hints at all. Naturally most online reviewers go ahead and spoil the movie anyway so you may want to avoid them before seeing the movie.
What I will say is that you do need to pay attention when watching this movie. There are things you should be noticing.
It begins with a daring jewel heist during the Cannes Film Festival. The jewels are in the form of a snake brassiere worn by a supermodel. Sexy Laure (Rebecca Romijn) steals the jewels while having sex with the supermodel in the ladies’ room. The heist is a spectacular extended visual set-piece with very little dialogue. When it comes to sheer mastery of technique De Palma has never done anything better. Then we get a chase of sorts, or maybe it’s a stalking, and it’s done as another impressive visual set-piece.
Laure figures she’d be wise to get out of France. Start a new life somewhere. Which she does. That’s going fine until down-at-heel paparazzo Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas) snaps her picture. Laure cannot afford to have any photographs of herself. Much too dangerous.
Then the twists start to kick in. Nicolas thinks he’s the knight in shining armour rescuing a damsel in distress. It takes him quite a while to realise that Laure is not a damsel in distress. She’s a psycho bitch. She’s a femme fatale on steroids.
Nicolas is in the spider’s web now. More plot twists follow, before the really big plot twist.
When the so-called New American Cinema burst onto the scene round 1967 it saw itself, like the French Nouvelle Vague, the British New Wave and the New German Cinema, as a revolutionary movement that would sweep away the past and create something totally new. Tradition was something that needed to be scrapped. It was all very adolescent.
Brian De Palma made his first feature film in 1968 but I think it’s clear that that was never his attitude. De Palma saw himself as part of a living tradition of filmmaking. He didn’t want to scrap that tradition. He wanted to be part of it.
Of course his admiration for Hitchcock was part of this. But he didn’t see Hitchcock’s body of work as a resource to be plundered. He had seen Hitchcock’s movies. He understood them. He understood Hitchcock’s methods. He has absorbed them. He then set out to make Brian De Palma movies, making use of the lessons he had learnt from Hitchcock and other masters of the past. Sure, he liked to include Hitchcock homages but they were clever and witty and his movies were always Brian De Palma movies.
He lays his cards on the table right at the start of Femme Fatale. We see a woman watching Double Indemnity on TV. We know that we’re about to see a movie that draws on the filmmaking tradition that produced movies like Double Indemnity.
There’s lots of voyeurism in this movie. With a hero who is a photographer and a photograph as a key plot element that’s to be expected and voyeurism is a theme that De Palma knew how to handle. At times in this movie there are multiple voyeurs. Lots of people are watching Laure.
You want wild crazy camera angles? You got ’em. And lots of very cool overhead shots. You want split screens? You got them too. And naturally split diopter shots. De Palma could get away with things like this. This is a De Palma film so naturally it is very much an exercise in style and it really does have insane amounts of style.
Laure (Rebecca Romijn) is very sexy and very wicked. De Palma doesn’t stint on the eroticism.
Antonio Banderas is very good and very sympathetic, playing a nice guy who is just getting more and more out of his depth.
As for the element I can’t talk about, whether it works or not is up to the viewer to decide. It’s something that has been done before but then De Palma adds some extra twists.
This is one of those movies that is worth rewatching. The second time around you’ll be seeing everything in a radically different way and you’ll be able to appreciate the way De Palma never actually cheats.
Femme Fatale is definitely a neo-noir but it’s a lot more than that. Very highly recommended.
Femme Fatale looks great on Blu-Ray. The Blu-Ray extras are, surprisingly, very worthwhile but do not under any circumstances watch the featurettes before you watch the movie. They contain a whole bunch of spoilers.
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