De Palma's Femme Fatale

Femme Fatale

From its "Fuck Billy Wilder" opening to its Divinely illuminated close, Femme Fatale may be Brian De Palma's greatest film. Critiquing what's wrong with Double Indemnity shows that he knows where modern movie culture needs to go?past gaudy sexist fantasies to a more thoughtful representation of man's (and woman's) fate. Working equally from his little head and his big head?and with a renewed compassion?De Palma enriches Femme Fatale's simple story (a young American woman in France tries maneuvering out of her involvement with a ring of jewel thieves and discovers her heart). But reading the plot is less important than considering the title, which is the film's theme. With his unfettered camera movements that evoke one's dreaming, De Palma employs the essence of cinema (picture-making) so that a viewer is enraptured by his visual intelligence: every sequence probes sexist female iconography for the soul it represents.

When Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) switches subtly from antagonist to protagonist to heroine, her surprise guises and personality twists turn viewers into agog patsies. Searching for the true Laure (seeing her life in spite of femme fatale conventions) requires we rethink dark ladies throughout movie history. De Palma's subject is "Femme Fatale" rather than "Woman," because he isn't a feminist academician but the same satiric, dirty-minded, complicated cineaste who was moved to explore his own bad side by Michael Powell's psycho-social Peeping Tom. He contemplates the generic ideas of female duplicity with the same dedication he brought to his analyses of crime and horror genres. But De Palma's rule-breaking formal experimentation (and emphasis on personality) also recalls his later "serious" inquiries into moral behavior, Casualties of War and Scarface. If De Palma were named Nabokov or Buñuel no one would mistake his intention. Femme Fatale's abstract style and direct emotions make viewers account for the pleasure taken all their lives from stories about shady ladies, the sexism they've unconsciously relished. De Palma challenges our empathy?and his own. He makes you think with your eyes. Quite a feat for a 62-year-old letch.

Femme Fatale's opening shot is a French tv broadcast of Double Indemnity, but laid over the b&w image of Barbara Stanwyck's sociopathic Phyllis Dietrichson is a color reflection of Laure sadly transfixed, anesthetized. This double-layering blends movie culture with contemporary consciousness. It's as provocative as Jean-Luc Godard's video project Histoires du Cinema, which also superimposed past and present movie images. Alerting our sophistication about film-watching, De Palma trumps Godard by going inside?and extending?the fictional premise. Critiquing Wilder at his cynical-cornball worst, De Palma insists we see the young woman subjected to classic film noir chauvinism anew. He opens this character's life to the same moral questions as our own. The unpredictable plot has a dreamlike inevitability.

It's revolutionary. In Lawrence Kasdan's 1981 Body Heat the noir femme fatale was treacherous as ever?a pattern dumbly followed in 1994's The Last Seduction and parodied in Paul Verhoeven's 1992 Basic Instinct. Those stereotypes implied a patriarchal view. Femme Fatale radically creates tension between standard plot conventions and unconscious social power (that's why dullards find it "convoluted"). De Palma manipulates Laure's cat-and-mouse games with various men, especially an ex-paparazzo, Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas, updating the peep-art heroes of De Palma's early movies). Quitting the exploitation profession, Nicolas privately works at assembling photo collages (he says he's trying to "catch lightning in a bottle") when he is captivated by Laure standing on church steps. Drawn together by curiosity, then sex, Laure and Nicolas demonstrate a clash of female and male narrative perspectives. (In front of a Video Sex Projection shop, he spies on her entering a Live Show nightclub?the different backgrounds contrasting male fantasy to female sojourn in a debased environment.) Laure's postverbal (for reasons later revealed) yet she generates a story of great sympathy.

That explains Ryuichi Sakamoto's uncredited musical theme. It's Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade?a parody, then full-symphonic splendor. De Palma weaves Laure's exploits as extravagantly as the Arabian Nights. More than half of Femme Fatale is dialogue-less, virtually a silent movie with classical-modernist sounds buoying and intensifying the images. While this excites the imagination it should also inspire reflection. De Palma doesn't spell out his attraction/suspicion concerning Laure; she's pure fascination?chic, sexy, puzzling but given a richly orchestrated emotional accompaniment.

Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is De Palma's most androgynous movie heroine. Blonde and delectable like Nancy Allen in Dressed to Kill, tall and imposing like John Lithgow in Raising Cain, she also suggests an ambulatory Sharon Stone (her hair pulled back in Basic Instinct's severe lesbian cut)?she's a conundrum. Romijn-Stamos also has a fashion model's chameleonic ambiguity; from the back she's just some anonymous hot chick, though she may be heaving in misery. Observing Romijn-Stamos tests our perception of all women. It extends De Palma's satire on movie-watching in the bravura Cannes Festival/jewel-robbery sequence (where French director Regis Warneris escorts Sandrine Bonnaire, the star of Est-Ouest, through the red carpet confusion?a game of illusion/reality, bicultural yin-yang).

Reworking such powerful sexual and cultural archetypes really is like catching lightning in a bottle. What academics would call the problematic of film noir isn't a dry hypothesis for De Palma. He electrifies Femme Fatale's issues through a circuitous plot that addresses Destiny (extreme events like Laure's fall through a skylight being mistaken for a suicide attempt). In the year's most truly original script?and De Palma's most instinctual writing?fate is the propulsive mechanism. Instead of merely replicating noir's dead end, Femme Fatale eventually transcends existential dread. Darkness gets rent by a shaft of redemptive light (the cause of a dancing/killing finale); its heavenly source only revealed during the end credits?a crucial part of De Palma's audacious narrative reconstruction. Be sure to sit still for the final, full tableau.

Ultimately Femme Fatale's images express De Palma's need to be cleansed of the trashy lies in his (our) head. Femme Fatale's plot and concept is a dream all moviegoers share but De Palma deconstructs Hollywood ideology by tallying the elements of cinema (and sexploitation) like a computer toolbox menu; he rebuilds/revises noir with the intricacy and flair that has always distinguished his cubist approach to film structure?fragmented events, doubled characters and fetish-object images. His complex style redounds to movie history: the narrative is slippery yet rooted as in the German expressionist The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and as irrational as the French surrealist landmark L'Age D'Or. For Laure, who believes the world is hell and (like Stanwyck's Dietrichson) describes herself as "rotten to the heart," De Palma's most magnificent trope provides necessary cleansing. This moment is not just virtuoso, it's the year's most cathartic movie image.

No deconstructionist ever dreamed that a mainstream moviemaker would explore the controversial Male Gaze so well as bad-boy De Palma does here. (It parallels Jonathan Demme's gracious casting of Thandie Newton in The Truth About Charlie and the work of Roger Vadim?cinema's other misunderstood hound dog.) Like Demme, De Palma's revision and exegesis derive from clever, informed movie lore. Nicolas' paranoid lookout at the church evokes Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black; Laure's changes of identity suggest Vertigo but with a woman in control. In a black wig she evokes Brigitte Bardot in Contempt just as the opening superimposition of modern and classical cinema (past and current female persecution) recalls Anna Karina watching Falconetti in Godard's My Life to Live. But Romijn-Stamos' lip-licking, American girl mischief (and grief) produces a bonus astonishment: for a minute she transforms into Bardot, traveling with a blue suitcase as at the end of Vadim's directorial debut that announced the practical beginning of the French New Wave. Femme Fatale similarly calls for a new era in movie-watching?or to be more precise, woman-watching and movie-thinking. Remember, that Vadim film De Palma conjures up was sincerely titled And God Created Woman. Like Femme Fatale, it's a sexy-holy pun.