2002 / 110 Minutes / R
Reviewed by Dale Nauertz

“Femme Fatale” is easily the coolest, most exciting film to come out of Brian De Palma in at least fifteen years. Since “The Untouchables” (if I may say so, De Palma’s master work) Brian’s work has grown increasingly more commercial and less enthusiastic. DePalma has turned out some decent work in this period (”Mission: Impossible”, “Raising Cain”) but nothing to rival such influential classics as “Carrie” and “Blow Out”. In his early days, De Palma was a god of style, breaking taboos and barriers with razor-sharp wit and impressive technical zest. You may find kernels of this brilliance sparkling in the corners of such work as “Mission to Mars” and “Snake Eyes”, but it’s only a ghost of the genius he once revealed in each and every film. To watch such films as “Dressed to Kill” and “Sisters” is to understand why film geeks like Jones and myself regard him as a godlike master of the medium, a man with an innate understanding of what the camera can do under the right circumstances.

“Femme Fatale” deserves comparison among the films I just mentioned. “Femme Fatale” is a bold, ballsy, provocative return to form by a god of the cinema. All of De Palma’s strengths are in full play. There is the playful camera work, the sensational and sometimes sleazy eroticism, the Hitchcock riffs, the sudden violence, and the tight plotting that were all such De Palma trademarks before he subjugated them to studio sensibilities.

The film kicks off with one of the greatest heists that any movie has ever treated us to: a bold stylistic enterprise involving a diamond-encrusted dress, lesbians, a playful cat and the Cannes Film Festival. The sequence is tightly wound and ingeniously set up and it sets the tone for the rest of the film. At no point during this sequence do we have any inkling about what might happen next. The same can be said for the rest of the story. The woman responsible for the heist (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) double crosses the rest of her gang and disappears to America as the wife of a powerful senator. Several years later, she returns to France, her husband now a diplomat, and has her photo taken by a reluctant paparazzo (Antonio Banderas). From there, the film really kicks into high gear, layering twists and double crosses and revelations so artfully that one can scarcely complain whether they seem feasible or not. One just sits in awe, waiting for the next turn the film might take and enjoying every mesmerizing second of it.

You see, “Femme Fatale” is obviously an exercise through which Brian is rediscovering the joy of making a film, of making his kind of film. This is the sort of movie where De Palma is at his most skillful and ruthlessly effective. De Palma is having a great time orchestrating the plot, placing his cameras, marshalling his crew and toying with his actors. He gets an impressive performance out of Miss Stamos and he gets Antonio to turn off his autopilot and have a little fun for a change. Brian is having as much fun as a kid in a candy store, and he gets us to do the same. The fact that the film actually romps in some nice sexual and psychological territory is just an added bonus.

“Femme Fatale” is one of the most invigorating and beguiling films of the year, as well as one of the few from 2002 that film students may be studying twenty years from now.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 6th, 2002 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Dale's Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.