Passion (2013)

Although his portfolio is quite diverse Brian De Palma is best known for his early-career sleek erotic thrillers in the Hitchcock manner such as Body Double (1984) and Dressed To Kill (1988). Passion is of the style but it is neither erotic nor thrilling, a lack for which its mirror-finish sleekness in no way compensates.

The film is set in the cut-throat (of course, this is to be taken literally) world of international corporate advertising, an unholy descendant of Mad Men. Isabelle (Noomi Rapace), a hot shot member of the creative team devises a hot internet campaign to promote a smartphone. The client is hugely impressed and it looks like Isabelle is about to get a major career boost and a New York posting. But to her shock her boss, Christine (Rachel McAdams), takes credit for her idea. Isabelle reasserts her ownership of the campaign by uploading a video to YouTube, where it gets a gazillion views in a matter of hours. Christine in turn organizes Isabelle’s public humiliation and so the war between the women escalates. The stakes, however, hardly seems worth the trouble that ensues partly perhaps because ownership of the web is less of a deal than it did back then but mainly because it's just plain silly.

The script for Passion was developed from Alain Corneau’s 2010 film Crime D’amour. I haven'tt seen that film but the French, as we know, love chic the apogee (or nadir, depending on your perspective), of which in film was the “cinema du look” of the 1980s with  which Passion could easily be grouped).

De Palma has a field day with the corporate setting, all glass and chrome, immacuate interiors raked by prison-like bars of dark and light. Cinematographer José Luis Alcaine’s bold camera work is so precise that it just about slices through your eyeballs. The connotative implications of this ice-cold setting climaxes with a split-screen set-piece in which a balletic performanance and the invasion of Christine’s home by a unknown an assailant is scored to Debussy's "Afternoon of a Faun".

There is much here that is characterisitic of the director’s auteur style and his admiration for Hitchcock. The development of a lesbian relationship between the two women (as well as one between Isabella and her protective assistant Dani, played by Karoline Herfurth) should have been the icing on the cake for De Palma but it generates little heat (“a woman scorned”, etc. etc) probably because it is not sufficiently fleshed out in the first part of the film.

McAdams and Rapace are OKish although the more Isabelle dements the more Rapace  looks like a character out of "Phantom of The Opera" (which De Palma essayed in 1974 as Phantom of the Paradise). The coupling of Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier in Corneau's film seems like it would have been more intriguing.

All up, Passion is big on style but low on credibility and probably won't appeal beyond the director's fans.

 

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