 Femme Fatale (2002) In Femme Fatale, De Palma plays all the cards in his deck, the result of which is an ambitious, sometimes exciting, often humdrum muddle. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos plays Laure/Lilly, a kind of triple-role signified by her hairstyles. After an elaborate opening heist at the Cannes Film Festival, and an extended lesbian make-out scene (!), an unlikely accident allows her to change identities, leave France, then return years later as the mysterious wife of the American Ambassador (played by the strangely youthful Peter Coyote – shouldn't he be like 80 by now?). But then there's the bad men she's double-crossed who want their diamonds back! In steps the patsy, photographer Nicholas Bardo (played by Antonio Banderas, and if I'm not mistaken, the word "bardo" is the Buddhist term for purgatory, though it could also be a sly reference to my old college friend Alex Barder). Laure/Lilly quickly ensnares Bardo with her feminine wiles, some more plot things happen, the end. Ambiguously for us, De Palma is an ardent practitioner of the "style over substance" school of filmmaking – he's got a great eye and knows how to choreograph some very tricky shots. He's also not afraid to imitate everyone, including himself, including even me. Problem is, though he intends to cook up a fresh meaty stew, what we get is peas porridge in the pot, nine days old. There's very little new in Femme Fatale, and while that may be partly the point, it doesn't really work. Most of the story is pretty easy to predict, at least in broad strokes – Lilly is bad to the core and shouldn't be trusted, Bardo is belligerently stupid and has to take the fall for her. But De Palma throws in a totally off-the-wall M. Night Shyamalan twist that literally made me drop my cocoa butter all over the new slipcovers, and despite Sofas-U-Love's well-advertised "we clean any stain" policy, the fine print clearly excludes "cocoa butter." Banderas and Romijn-Stamos, surprisingly, do have chemistry, and it's all moderately entertaining in a B-movie kind of way, but shoddy execution outstrips grand ambition by roughly the length of Romijn-Stamos' scrawny legs (28'3"). It's hard not to think of how much cooler, sexier and more shocking was some of De Palma's earlier work, especially Body Double, the most obvious predecessor to Femme Fatale. I mean, there's nothing to compare with that scary erotic scene in Body Double when Melanie Griffith-Johnson-Banderas infiltrates the Nazis and wins the hot dog-eating contest by simulating fellatio a hundred times in five minutes. It's just hard to mix sex and violence in a way that's really interesting or eye-raising anymore, without resorting to horny nuns or six year-old ladyboy prostitutes. And really, what's the point … just watch the nightly news, you degenerate fuckwits. The real solution is to force all these great directors—De Palma, Coppola, Scorsese, even and especially Spielberg—to put down the bag of tricks, walk away from the mountains of cocaine and endless parade of Playboy Playmates, and create truly great, transcendent, uncompromising modern films that are exciting, unique and emotional without being crass or manipulative. Which is about as likely as me getting off my fat ass and doing even one freaking sit-up.
Review by Crimedog |