A Masterful Work of Trashy Filmmaking

Brian De Palma is Columbia University's greatest filmmaker. While an argument can be made for Jim Jarmusch, the sheer size of De Palma's forty year oeuvre next to Jarmusch's handful of masterpieces and near-misses tilts the balance in the former's favor. De Palma's real admirers, however, lie far outside of Morningside Heights and across the Atlantic in America-hating, America-loving France. Where Mission: Impossible was (perhaps unfairly) treated here as an efficient blockbuster, De Palmists in France greeted it as a masterpiece; where Mission to Mars was (justly) excoriated in the American press, many Frenchman thought it was one of the best pictures of the year. As for Carlito's Way, well, it tied with Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Goodbye South, Goodbye and Clint Eastwood's Bridges of Madison County as the greatest film of the 1990s in Cahier du cinema's poll.

Having taken all these plaudits to his head, De Palma has recently relocated to Paris, and his first European film, Femme Fatale, is an auteur project if nothing else, though nevertheless distributed by AOL Time Warner for stateside release. Moving beyond self-parody and self-pastiche, De Palma has entered a bizarre zone where the entire world functions with the hermetic logic of his own design. Though the setting is ostensibly Paris, the film couldn't be farther from the City of Lights: instead, it's closer in spirit to Disneyland Paris, a.k.a. EuroDisney. De Palma's penchant for set-piece rides has evolved (or perhaps devolved) into a movie-wide aesthetic: Femme Fatale is De Palma Land.
Femme Fatale is no cultural Chernobyl (as French newspaper Le Monde deemed EuroDisney) but it does function at the level of near meltdown. The current gold standard of international cinema is the lesbian make-out scene, with David Lynch's Mulholland Drive being the present champion, of course. Femme Fatale's opening makes Lynch's sequence look G-rated: Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and current Gucci spokesmodel Rie Rasmussen french and grope for what seems like hours in the glass bathroom stall of the Cannes Film Festival, with the latter wearing only (and only occasionally at that) a mini-skirt and a serpentine jewel top which covers perhaps two square inches of flesh.

To backtrack: Romijn-Stamos plays a thief working for an ill-defined international consortium, attempting a heist of the said serpent top (or perhaps it should be called body necklace) by having Romijn-Stamos replace it during the said making out. In what functions as a greatly magnified version of the CIA infiltration in Mission: Impossible, De Palma tracks several threads simultaneously: the heist team's attempts at disabling the security room, Romijn-Stamos's path into the building and subsequent encounter in the bathroom, and, jaw-droppingly, the Cannes premiere of the very real (and very bad) film East-West, featuring director Regis Wargnier, playing himself. The sequence's sustained mastery of parallel montage and sinuous camera movement, combined with the intricate sound design is overwhelming; De Palma has rarely matched this level of achievement in his career.

Unfortunately, the film peaks at that mark. Romijn-Stamos, established as a femme fatale in the amazing opening shot of her reflected body in the glass of a TV set playing Double Indemnity, betrays her heistmates. Antonio Banderas enters the plot as a sleazy paparazzi photographer, and the chronology jumps forward seven years. Never a believer in character, De Palma deploys Romijn-Stamos and Banderas more as figurative motifs as the movie descends into a strange zone between camp and parody.
A moebius strip wrapped inside of a riddle inside of a moebius strip, the entire film can be read as a De Palma gloss on Mulholland Drive, though in fact the two works gestated separately. Without giving away too much, there's a lesbian couple at the film's center, though that's not entirely clear at first, and the Romijn-Stamos character is as much an identity-shifting blonde as Naomi Watts's. Add De Palma's affinity for trick narratives, and you have the equivalent of several Lynchian mystery boxes and keys.

Does Femme Fatale have any depths at all beyond its surface gleam? Or, to phrase the question differently, why defend this vapid, well-oiled piece of machinery-cum-trash? To commit a sacrilege that I admit is a sacrilege: Femme Fatale is best thought of as realization of Robert Bresson's koan to "Think of the surface, only the surface." De Palma's vision, realized here without the limitations of studio interference, is appalling in its emptiness but stunning in its virtuosity. Femme Fatale, whatever its monstrous limitations, is the work of an old master--and that is frightening.