Femme Fatale

Saturday, February 2, 2008

As I recall, this was not a successful or well-liked movie when it was released in 2002. I was a Brian DePalma fan, and I liked it, but I mostly dismissed it as good fun.

I can see why people wouldn't like this movie. It's strange, there isn't much character development (the main character doesn't have any substantive dialogue until the last 30 minutes or so, and actually it's not always clear which character is the main one), and the plot is silly and has a weird cop-out ending.

It's taken almost 5 years, but I now clearly see this film as the sort of weird, unique masterpiece that it is. And the trick is, you have to have seen a lot of DePalma movies. Otherwise, it doesn't make much sense. Having, since I first saw Femme Fatale, watched the DePalma thrillers Sisters, Obsession, Raising Cain, and more significantly repeat viewings of Dressed to Kill, Carrie and Body Double, I "get" this film more.

It's almost like he deliberately set out to make a film that could only be analyzed via the auteur theory. There is not a frame of this movie that could have been conceived by anyone but Brian DePalma. Every single shot sticks a megaphone right in your ear and screams "DePalma!" at the top of its lungs. It's a film seemingly made to reference his own filmography. It has all his touches. The cockeyed structural experiments. The extended slow motion sequences. The reappropriated Hitchcockian touches. The ornate suspense set-pieces. Audacity on every level of storytelling. A dream-like feel. A mishmash of supreme confidence and batshit insanity. This is a masterpiece of style-as-substance.

It's every one of his Hitchcock on drugs, weird-ass, DePalmian thrillers distilled into their ultimate form. It is DePalma analyzing and deconstructing his own style, then building it back up again and pumping it full of steroids.

He tried this once before with Raising Cain, but where that is a bizarre, fascinating failure, this is a bizarre, fascinating success.

I can't really call this one his "best," and Dressed to Kill will probably remain my "favorite" in that it's the one I would watch the most. But few directors have ever made a film that so clearly pinpoints their own unique style in every possible way.