Flak Magazine: Review of Femme Fatale, 11-14-02

Brian DePalma's filmography is varied enough that you never know what to expect, but when Femme Fatale was announced, it's a safe bet that no one expected a chick flick. And I don't mean "chick flick" in some precious, postmodern way — DePalma's films have never been shy about their preoccupation with women, but for all its telekinesis, not even his Carrie (maybe the most famous menarche movie ever) was this girl power.

Femme Fatale is a yea-rah, life-in-extremis, girls-kick-ass festival that's thrilling and moving and fun and inspiring in a way that something like Charlie's Angels, with its steering-wheel licking and Spider-Man Underoos, misses by a mile. Ever After filled Cinderella's supernatural-benefactor archetype with Leonardo DaVinci; Femme Fatale reclaims the fairy godmother. XX Movies like Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood celebrate vivid sorority against the backdrop of oatmeal masculinity; Femme Fatale explodes the gender machine, giving each sex its due and detailing how they mesh, but always reserving its worship for women.

Still, this isn't Thelma & Louise or Boys on the Side — there's gunplay, sex, high-tech thievery, man-on-man and man-on-woman violence, identity theft, emotional and sexual manipulation, stripteasing, unending luxe (even the urinals are decadent), impalings, suicide … a whole catalog of thriller machinations right out of DePalma's top drawer. It's always exciting and gorgeous; DePalma is at the peak of his game technically. But the movie is suffused with a rare heart and wit, as well as a morality that keeps you with the characters even when their characterization is less than robust.

The central figure is Laure (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), who's in France as the third member of a heist squad at Cannes trying to lift $10 million in gold and diamonds off the bod of Veronica (Rie Rasmussen), who's wearing the serpentine jewelry for a top. Their plan to remove it? Have Laure seduce and disrobe Veronica in the bathroom, and then swap the piece with a fake. (If it wasn't already abundantly clear, Femme Fatale isn't for everyone.) Of course, things go wrong and people get crossed, culminating in an on-the-lam Laure being mistaken for Lily, a semi-missing person who has just suffered multiple family deaths. Lily's unfortunate state opens doors for Laure, who lash-flutters her way into the life on a prominent American businessman.

How she ends up back in Paris being exploited and then cared for by ex-paparazzi Nicolas (Antonio Banderas) isn't really worth getting into, except to say that this is the relationship at the heart of the film. Nicolas is the prototypical white knight, moved by chivalrous impulses to take care of Laure, whom he knows can't take care of herself. It's this bit of chauvinism that the film really relishes: Laure exploits Nicolas' condescending tendency to watch out for her, currying a host of different situations to her favor. The movie celebrates this, while at the same time critiquing it by following it to its disreputable conclusion, but then at the other same time critiquing that critique by showing another path.

If that seems involved to you, keep in mind that usually movies stop at the "disreputable conclusion" level — this is the heart of noir, where most of cinema's femmes fatale come from. When DePalma (who also wrote the movie) rights the ship and (slight spoiler) delivers a happy ending, it's almost unnerving how affecting it is to see things turn out right, and the film closes with the very hopeful possibility of connection between two lost souls. It is, in more ways than one, the analog-but-inverse of Mulholland Drive, which snuck from good to bad and then plummeted to miserable. Where that movie put forth a soul-rattling cautionary tale, Femme Fatale offers redemption.

As Laure, Romijn-Stamos succeeds when the character allows her to display some comic gifts, which is more often than not. Her visual magnetism makes it clear why DePalma wants to feature her a noir thriller with a happy ending — she (and we) gets to have our cake and eat it, too — but it's hardly an acting (or at least actor's) showcase.

For a long time, people have floated misogynist accusations at DePalma for movies like Sisters, Dressed to Kill and Body Double, because of the delight they take in women in peril. But as DePalma has said, his movies simply delight in women (offering, in return, better roles than in these movies' genre peers), with peril as a necessary condition of the thriller. Femme Fatale, like the Coens' recent work, closes the door on claims of the director's heartlessness — it's practically a hymn, as much in love with its own beauty as it is with its twin muses of women and other movies. And it hardly needs to be said that it's bravura filmmaking of a caliber unlike almost anything else out there right now, with every shot finding some new way to make you gasp or smile. See it in theaters while you can.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)