FEMME FETALE
Tagline: Nothing is more desirable or more deadly than a woman with a secret
Pizza: L.A. Valley Pizzaland
Preshow Entertainment: None
IN FEMME FATALE, REBECCA ROMIJN HAS
ANTONIO BANDERAS IN DE PALMA HER HAND
ANTONIO BANDERAS IN DE PALMA HER HAND
With the exception of HOME MOVIES (1980), I like or love every film Brian De Palma has made. Sure, he's been rightfully accused of lifting from Hitchcock, but so what? He's not simply great at that, he's also great at understanding film, and in turn, making them. So make no mistake, this movie is not about Rebecca Romijn (then Romijn-Stamos) and Antonio Banderas, nor is it about the fun yet ludicrous plot teeming with buys and coincidences. FEMME FATALE (2002) is all about the craft of Brian De Palma, and for that alone, it's worth it.
FEMME FATALE opens with a hot naked girl smoking in bed while watching maybe the best noir film, DOUBLE INDEMNITY...with French subtitles. I suppose it's plausible, but it also tells us the absurdities are only going to get bigger. Much of the upcoming ridiculousness comes after this preamble in the opening heist sequence. Suspense is De Palma's strong suit, and this is one of the most fun scenes in the movie. That said, it's silly. No criminal in their right mind would hatch a plan with this many ways to go wrong. That bothered me. For as fun as FEMME FATALE is, it trips itself up with its over-the-top-ness, not to mention perhaps the corniest last line in film history. Oops. I mentioned it.
FEMME FATALE is the hypnopompic story of Laure (Romijn), a heartless, double-crossing sizzler who, at the Cannes Film Festival, steals 10 million dollars in diamonds by removing them from a model's body while making out with her in the restroom. (Coincidentally, real thieves made off with over a million dollars of jewelry at Cannes just a few weeks ago - http://goo.gl/gSkni). Then, instead of sharing the diamonds with her heist crew, she takes them all for herself. Later, the bad guys catch her, but because of a series of absurd and impossibly lucky events (one or two would have been okay...forty or so's a bit much), she's able to escape, change her identity, and live happily ever after. No, that's not entirely true. Seven years later, the bad guys find her. But Laure, who is now Lily, is whip smart with feline survival impulses. To save her hotass ass, she uses anyone she can, like Puss In Boots Banderas, who plays paparazzo Nicolas Bardo.
De Palma saturates the film with invisible details as well as clues that, when displayed for us, we don't know are clues. Even the bad guy known as Black Tie winks at us in the very first scene, a wink we can only figure out retrospectively, once we have more information later. And because we don't yet know what the heist is all about (De Palma is amazing at this...remember all that great MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE stuff going on simultaneously?), and who's who, we don't know that he's giving away a major plot twist right before our eyes. Of course, having two hot girls deep tongue kissing may have distracted a few of us.
But because things in FEMME FATALE often get silly, we don't take these details seriously, and because we don't take them seriously, we don't watch for them with the keen eye that we should. That's why FEMME FATALE is both so good and so frustrating. Had we been more deeply invested, we'd wonder why it's 3:33 on the clock when Laure's taking a bath and 3:33 on the clock when Bardo is being interrogated by the police. Coincidence? And why is that fish tank overflowing?? So, if you haven't seen the movie, I would urge you to take it seriously...if you can, because there's so much fun in the details. Everything means something, so pay attention. And it's okay to be confused. It's intentional. It'll all start to make sense as things unfold. Yet - not everything will be explained. I'll never know why Laure gives a soliloquy in English to Lily, who is French. And just how did Nicolas get to the street so fast after witnessing the accident from his apartment at the end? Also, as a photog, why does he choose not to bring his camera with him when he runs to the accident? This is not to say De Palma doesn't know what he's doing. Au contraire. There's great stuff here besides the aforementioned opening Cannes sequence, like when (the real) Lily returns to her house to kill herself. Not only is it a suspenseful and even intense full five minutes - with no dialogue - but it holds the movie's wonderful morality moment; Laure, who is hiding and watching Lily, knows she will be able to get Lily's identity if Lily kills herself. But...Laure has to stand there and...watch Lily kill herself. I love that. This eventually leads to the movie's theme - if you had a chance to do something over again, something that you did that was bad...would you?
Other things I love, a scene where two characters each pretend to be someone else, without the other one knowing. And oh, that final scene (De Palma bookended the movie with his two best scenes), featuring so many things working as a coalition (the photographer waiting for the sunlight, the same sunlight that will change the course of the story by shining its light on something once owned by the real Lily). It's a sequence worthy to be in the same De Palma's Greatest Hits reel as THE UNTOUCHABLES staircase. Speaking of which, FEMME FATALE harkens back to some of his most playful films like BODY DOUBLE and DRESSED TO KILL, and finds De Palma once again utilizing split screens, slow motion, isolated sound effects, and lengthy, balletic, dialogue-free VERTIGO-y scenes. And I, for one, welcome them all.
Here's another love/hate thing I have for this movie. LOVE: There are moments sprinkled throughout where characters like Lily's husband Watts (Peter Coyote), Watts's security guy Shiff (the always fun De Palma stable actor Gregg Henry, who is Gregg Lee Henry when he performs his music), maids and bartenders simply walk by in scenes they don't belong in. HATE: But why? Well, I won't give that away here in writing. But here's my clue - it's Cliche 101. Even De Palma himself was aware he was probably "splitting your audience down the center," but he went for it anyway. Good for him. Good for half of us.
Here's something really cool I uncovered while digging around about FEMME FATALE. The screening they go to in the opening Cannes scene is for a real movie, made a few years earlier, called EST-OUEST, and the real director (Regis Wargnier) and star (Sandrine Bonnaire) play prominently in the scene (the model wearing the diamonds is their companion).
Unfortunately, despite having shadows of blinds on the wall, FEMME FATALE never really felt like noir to me, though noir is clearly its intent (the name of Laure is close to Gene Tierney's classic femme fatale Laura in the Otto Preminger film called - LAURA). And just because you dress Romijn like a Hitch woman doesn't mean she is one. So the question remains, is Rebecca Romijn a match for the steeliness of say N X NW's Eva Marie Saint or INDEMNITY'S Barbara Stanwyck? The answer is no and no. Her reads on her lines feel like that of a friend at your dinner table putting on a gangster's voice while trying for a laugh. She seemed anti-sexy here, like she was trying to be alluring and sexy instead of being alluring and sexy. She even failed at trying to look tough smoking a cigarette. And how about Banderas? Does he have the gravitas of Fred McMurray? Again, no. He seems dreadfully miscast, feeling to me as if he were acting in a comedy instead of a thriller. This doesn't mean that FEMME FATALE is a failure. For on its own water-seeking level (that's a pun, as this movie overflows with water - fish tanks, baths, drinking glasses, shadows on ceilings, and even the opening shot of movie-within-a-movie EST-OUEST), it manages to walk the line between Hitchcock and cheese. Fortunately, I'm okay with both.
