Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale is a big, juicy, sexy thriller.
As the kind of overwrought heist flick that few other directors have the guts or gumption to direct, De Palma's loopy effort is a treat for fans who like their sex & violence delivered with a lot of imagination and a wicked sense of humour. It even inspires me to forgive De Palma for Bonfire Of The Vanities, a movie that people laughed at for unintended reasons.
And yes! You are supposed to bust loose watching Femme Fatale when emerging star Rebecca Romijn-Stamos -- a drop-dead gorgeous model-turned-actress in her first lead role -- gets up to no good. Romijn-Stamos, best known on celluloid for her outrageous blue-nude character Mystique in The X-Men, plays the title character.
The first glimpse of her here is reclining semi-naked watching Double Indemnity on TV, just before she executes a jewel heist at a gala movie premiere at the Cannes Film Festival (most of the movie is set in France).
The classic 1944 movie clip, with Barbara Stanwyck getting up to her style of no-good with Fred MacMurray, is a clue for audiences to predict Romijn-Stamos' duplicity. It also sets the tone: This is a modern film noir feature.
So the subsequent Chopard jewel heist -- which involves a torrid lesbian sex scene between our anti-heroine and a character played by model Rie Rasmussen in a luxury washroom in the Cannes Grand Palais, during a screening of the French film East-West -- is just an excuse to set up the real purpose of the piece,which is character interaction.
Film noir is never about the crime, it's about the criminals and those who pursue them. These films are cat-and-mouse games, challenges for characters to go straight or get even more crooked.
Romijn-Stamos, directed with panache by De Palma and given crisp lines of dialogue and hyper-real situations in his script, is a great criminal. Think of a bisexual femme version of James Bond gone bad, without losing her charm.
Be prepared for some insane plot twists, some of which enter into surreal territory. De Palma actually wants film critics to give his plot secrets away, because he thinks the movie will still play the same way, but I disagree. It's juicier without inside knowledge. The surprise element is strong.
Meanwhile, every great bad girl needs men to mess around with (in addition to girlfriends, in this case).
That's when Antonio Banderas, as an art photographer who is obliged to turn into a paparazzo for the cash, gets involved. So does Peter Coyote as a U.S. diplomat. Both Banderas and Coyote are dumbstruck as they are sucked into the black widow's spider web, another film noir tradition.
Femme Fatale, which served as the official closing night gala of the Toronto film festival in September, does not ultimately have anything profound to say. The appeal is in the delicious way it says its sweet or savage nothings.
(This film is rated AA)
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