Femme Fatale

Synopsis: Following a failed $10 million diamond heist, Frenchwoman Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) is chased into hiding by her accomplices whom she has just double-crossed. Taking on a new identity she marries a wealthy American and hides out in the United States. Things go wrong when her husband becomes the American ambassador to France and she is forced to return to the scene of her crime. Harassed by the paparazzi her face is soon on the cover of every French gossip magazine and her vengeful colleagues can at last hunt her down. She once again uses her feminine charms to seduce photographer Bardo (Antonioo Banderas) into helping her but can she escape a second time?

Following a succession of critical and financial failures, Mission to Mars and Snake Eyes in particular, Brian De Palma has returned to the genre that he made his name, the erotic thriller. With Dressed to Kill and Body Double the director mixed his two favourite subjects, Alfred Hitchcock and naked female flesh to great effect. In Femme Fatale he tries too hard to give the audience what he thinks they want resulting in an over-convoluted but entertaining failure. When it’s great it’s fabulous but when its bad it really struggles.

The opening jewellery heist at Cannes Film Festival is a case in point; it’s the perfect combination of eroticism, thrills and suspense that the rest of the film strives for but never reaches. De Palma’s direction is stylish but the derivative plot devices and cinematic tricks used to try and trick the audience seem empty and leave the viewer wanting more than the rather fraudulent denouement provides. It’s a shame, because some scenes are wonderful. Not even Ryuichi Sakamoto’s excellent score, that make good use of Rodgrigo's Concierto d Aranjuez, can save De Palma’s film.

The Parisian locations look stunning and the French actors add a European flavour to the proceedings. Its good to see them using their native tongue rather than speaking English, the usual cop-out in Hollywood films. Antonio Banderas and Peter Coyote give solid performances but the film’s trump card is Romijn-Stamos who gives a brave and uninhibited performance. Her provocative striptease is eye-opening but she is sadly not so convincing when she plays the good girl. The film opens by quoting from Billy Wilder's 1944 classic film noir, Double Indemnity but whilst Romijn-Stamos may not in the same acting league as Barbara Stanwyck, the main problem that is in De Palma's script her character is entirely two-dimensional - a cartoon bad girl but hardly what the film's title suggests she is which requires a nuance which is entirely absent here.

Overall, as with all of Brian De Palma’s work, Femme Fatale is definitely worth a watch. He has always been one of Hollywood’s finest visual stylists but in this instance his writing talents seem to have lost him. The halcyon days of Carrie and Scarface never seemed quite so far away.

 

 

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