Femme Fatale
By my count, Femme Fatale is Brian De Palma’s 26th feature, and as I watched it the first time two months ago I found myself capitulating to its inspired formalist madness–something I’ve resisted in his films for the past 30-odd years. De Palma’s latest isn’t so much an improvement on his earlier work as a grand synthesis of it–as if he set out to combine every previous thriller he’d made in one hyperbolically frothy cocktail. So we get split-screen framing; bad girls; sweetie-pie male suckers; verbal and physical abuse; lots of blood; a melodramatic story stretched out over many years; slow-motion, lyrically rendered catastrophes; noirish lighting schemes favoring venetian blinds; it-was-all-a-dream plot twists; scrambled and recomposed plot mosaics; obsessional repetitions of sound and image; pastiches of familiar musical pieces (in this case Ravel and Satie); nearly constant camera movements; and ceiling-height camera angles. Best of all, we often get several of these things simultaneously. (One of the few De Palma movies for which he takes sole script credit, Femme Fatale is nothing if not personal.) What I haven’t liked about his work is still there, but I’ve had to readjust how I see it.
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I’d always been annoyed by De Palma’s intricate borrowings from Alfred Hitchcock, which I’ve tended to see more as mangled tributes than as perceptive appreciations. My misgivings were only reinforced when his biggest fans, especially Pauline Kael and her most literal followers, implied that Hitchcock was a bit of a hack next to the genius De Palma–suggesting that Hitchcock churned out dross, which his disciple somehow turned into the pure gold of sublime trash. De Palma’s borrowings were all the more irritating when it became clear that much of his supposed fealty to the master came less from his soul than from his big production budgets, which enabled him to hire Bernard Herrmann for Sisters and Obsession–though all he wanted Herrmann to do was imitate his scores for Vertigo and Psycho. Say what you will about Hitchcock’s calculation, his work displays an almost limitless curiosity about human behavior, whereas De Palma’s shows an interest in people (as opposed to types and figures) that approaches zero.
The postmodernist assumption behind this whole exercise is that we’re only pretending we believe that these events are taking place and that these bodies are human characters. As a consequence, a certain telegraphic crudeness becomes both desirable and necessary. Black Tie, for instance, has to be hyperbolically abusive toward Laure just to show that he’s even more of a villain than she is. When he’s shot a little later, he has to bleed buckets, and the red stains on his dress shirt have to be just as vivid when he emerges from prison seven years later. (This detail provoked laughter in the audience both times I saw the movie–laughter that suggested affection as well as ridicule.)
I realize that De Palma’s thrillers are commonly regarded as emotional rather than cerebral, but I’d question how emotional one can be about characters one only halfheartedly (quarter-heartedly?) believes in. Laure finds herself mistaken for a woman who looks exactly like her, a woman named Lily (also played by Romijn-Stamos) seen playing Russian roulette as she hysterically grieves the loss of her children–a hysteria that’s stylized in such a way that it becomes a parody of extreme emotion. This is a cerebral take on the way hundreds of other movies have defined hysteria rather than any form of observation, a semaphoric set of signals designed to represent hysteria rather than embody it. De Palma intends to steer us through the thriller mechanics and conventions, not let us get bogged down in emotions.
Tarkovsky–a formalist who’s often been misidentified as a humanist, perhaps because of his mysticism–sometimes showed a similar indifference to his characters, such as the family of the hero who burns his house down in the final sequence of his last film, The Sacrifice. Formalism and an absence of humanism don’t necessarily entail a lack of artistic seriousness. Indeed, looking for symmetry and coherence in a universe that seems to consist only of chaotic fragments from other movies–a very contemporary and very real dilemma–might constitute a genuine quest for transcendence.
