Femme Fatale promises Brian DePalma’s return to great filmmaking. Unfortunately, it’s an empty promise that DePalma may or may not live up to three or four films from now. A mess of a genre exercise, Femme Fatale bulges with many of DePalma’s obsessions, including Hitchcock and Film Noir, but in the end it’s just as hollow as Rebecca Romijn-Stamos’ performance.
The picture opens with the climactic scene of Billy Wilder’s classic Double Indemnity on a French hotel television. From there we dive into a thrilling jewel heist sequence with Laure Ash (Romijn-Stamos in all her somnambulistic glory) where things go wrong and the plot bolts into motion. In the aftermath of the heist, the plot missteps and never recovers.
The first misstep comes when Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas) takes Ash’s picture. Sure, DePalma has a fixation with Antonioni’s Blow Up, but in Femme Fatale the pic never comes up as a plot point. It just serves as weak character introduction in a lame version of meeting cute. As if this wasn’t bad enough, we stumble into a doppelganger plotline and are even treated to a “seven years later” fast-forward – all with the clumsy earnestness of a first year student film, not the sure hand of a man whom trailers proclaim is the “master of the erotic thriller.” While DePalma may at one point have shown mastery of the genre, it takes a truly flawed vision to make a girl-on-girl toilet stall groping session less interesting than the bumblings of a comical security guard.
There’s all the standard DePalma moments: the Psycho shower quote, the split screen action, and even the false ending upon false ending, but it’s all by rote. Back in the 70s, DePalma was derided for just throwing his two cents onto Hitchcock retreads, but now, a quarter decade later, he is just soullessly doing a Hitchcock-meets-Film Noir retread in the style of Brian DePalma. He’s become his own influence and not in a good way.
This is not to say that it is entirely the director’s fault. The film also suffers from an awful script. Of course that script is also by DePalma, so that’s not much of a reprieve. Compound this with the fact that Romijn-Stamos gives a performance so bad in its category that it ranks only second to Cindy Crawford in Fair Game. Banderas comports himself admirably, even with a sequence done as a middle-school talent show style gay stereotype.
Also damaging this picture are awful clashes in difficulty. At times the film moves so fast it’s almost impossible to keep up with. It is at these times that the viewer starts to think that maybe DePalma is no longer the burn-out who bungled Bonfire of the Vanities and inflicted Mission to Mars on us. But then the movie slows to catch its breath and explain things to the ten-year-olds that might have snuck in.
These are the times when one realizes they’ve been sold a bill of goods. A fast-talking salesman who once sold us some of the best cars we’d ever driven has now foisted us into a bondo-covered Lincoln with an empty engine compartment.
While this picture is better than Mission to Mars, it’s not even quite as good as Snake Eyes (a sadly flawed film in its own right). Maybe DePalma is back on track. Maybe Femme Fatale is his rusty return to the material he loves. Part of me hopes so, but most of me doesn’t believe it. Most of me thinks that DePalma is truly done. He’s cashing in on his rep and connections to make pictures that he thinks might be hits regardless of what he knows is good. Or maybe he has truly lost sight of what is good.
If you’re a hardcore DePalma fan you’ve already seen this picture, even if you haven’t bought a ticket that says Femme Fatale. If you don’t really know DePalma’s stuff then go out and get Blow Out and enjoy it. Femme Fatale is a picture that should be avoided by all but the bravest film geek.
