Femme Fatale By Peter Tonguette Peter Tonguette was Staff Critic for The Film Journal from 2002 to 2005.  His writing has also appeared in Senses of Cinema, Bright Lights Film Journal, Contracampo, and 24fps Magazine.

With unexpected force, some of the major auteur figures from the golden era of '70s American cinema have reemerged in 2002 with works affirming their validity in an altered film scene.

This past spring, Peter Bogdanovich released his first theatrical feature in nine years, The Cat's Meow, which managed to fuse what was essentially a "job of work" (to use John Ford's favorite term for what he regarded as hack work) with an unexpected degree of commitment and sympathy on the part of the director. In August, Clint Eastwood offered an entertaining variation on themes which have become part and parcel of his work from the last five years in Blood Work. That same month Walter Hill emerged from the disaster of Supernova --re-cut against his wishes and probably ill-conceived to begin with--with a tightfisted minor masterpiece in Undisputed. And in November, Brian De Palma emerged with his first film in two years, and the first he scripted in a decade, with Femme Fatale.

On a purely superficial level, Femme Fatale might seem like nothing more than a respectable return to what De Palma does best--big, fun, flashy eye candy--after the perceived debacle of 2000's Mission to Mars. And the film is certainly richly satisfying on that level. But I'm afraid that casual viewers--and even De Palma enthusiasts--will see it as nothing more than this--a series of brilliantly orchestrated set-pieces searching for a story or, even, a point.

Instead, as with Bogdanovich's film, De Palma's is enhanced by an extra level of moral seriousness: beneath the shimmering surface lies a movie as personal to De Palma as Mission to Mars and it's boy's eye view of space. Unlike that previous film, however, Femme Fatale isn't at war with itself: the virtues of Mission to Mars --principally De Palma's uncynical wonder at the mysteries of the universe--must be isolated from what is largely a failed film. For those interested in De Palma's cinema, and I would assume for the director himself, the majorly flawed script was only a means to an end in indulging in and experiencing those sentiments, and the picture wasn't the better for it.

Femme Fatale, however, is De Palma's film through and through. Convoluted beyond reason, the film opens with a detailed double cross involving one of the most unexpected jewel heists ever filmed, murder, and escape, all set against the 2001 Cannes Film Festival and scored to a euphoric rendition of Ravel's Bolero. Virtually silent apart from the intoxicating sway of the music, this fifteen-minute sequence has De Palma reaching back to the syntax of the silent cinema to allow his audience to rediscover along with him the essence of what once made movies so gripping and stimulating: relaying a complex series of events visually, without the crutches of expository dialogue. That most of his audience will have never seen a silent film, let alone harbor a memory of one, is not important to his mission, as De Palma is not interested in giving viewers a history lesson but proving that the essential grammar of silent cinema can still possess a powerful grip over an audience's emotions and intelligence even in this bastardized age of sound. The audiences I have seen Femme Fatale with seem captivated, as if re-experiencing a collective memory of what cinema used to be.

It is in the film's opening sequence that we are introduced to De Palma's heroine, Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, in the year's most unexpectedly fine performance), who flees the scene after double-crossing her partners in crime, Black Tie (Eriq Ebouaney) and Racine (Edouard Montoute). In an effort to evade their wrath, Laure perpetuates her bad deeds, assuming the identity of another woman, whose suicide she witnesses and does nothing to prevent. Under the pretense of the deceased woman, Laure eventually marries an American ambassador (Peter Coyote) and becomes entangled in progressively more lurid efforts to keep her duplicitous past hidden, eventually ensnaring a caring tabloid photographer, Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas).

All of the above is relayed in rousing fashion, though it's admittedly rather conservative territory for a director as prolific in the suspense genre as De Palma has been. But 3/4 of the way through Femme Fatale, De Palma springs a devastatingly, exhilaratingly unexpected surprise on his audience: all of the events after the woman's suicide are imagined by Laure in what amounts to a nightmarish fever dream. She awakens just before the woman is about to kill herself--again--and the possibility is raised that the nightmare she has just witnessed may repeat itself if she does nothing to prevent it. This time Laure intervenes, aware what fate may have in store for them both, and stops the woman from killing herself. The film then loops back on itself, rushing towards what can only be described as an exuberantly, defiantly happy ending: inconceivable as such an ending may have been during the film's first half, all it took was a change of direction in the second to arrive at it.

Femme Fatale, then, is really two pictures: both are meditations on the consequences of the actions of the film's prologue. What lends the film it's moral interest is partially De Palma's daring and politically incorrect insistence that the "dark" section of the film is eventually revealed to be all fantasy and it's the optimistic section that actually transpires. Even more vital to the film's moral imagination is De Palma's insistence that the latter portion of his story can only be reached by way of the first; that is, through an understanding of life's dark alleys, pitfalls, and the ease with which mistakes blossom into disasters. And in telling the story of Laure, De Palma again provides a seemingly definitive answer to the charges of misogyny which have followed him around for years by committing himself to an essentially feminist precept: his heroine is in control of her destiny and, through self-examination, possesses the will to alter it for the better.

Paradoxically, then, this is a film top-heavy with chance, fate, acts of randomness and matters of destiny. Artifice is the operative word here. But to my mind this doesn't diminish the film's moral vision; the only act which matters to Laure is the one which she has full control over. Jonathan Rosenbaum has compared the experience of viewing the film to that of assembling a jigsaw puzzle; I think that's right in that it takes into account the surplus of "missing pieces" which come together by the final act. However, unlike a jigsaw puzzle, the final picture revealed by the missing pieces isn't what's satisfying about completing the act; what's satisfying is that it took an act of moral wisdom to reach that point.

Undoubtedly, many viewers will either lack the courage to take the film's themes seriously on their own merits or, even worse, deny they even exist to begin with. But that would be a tragedy, as Femme Fatale is one of the most entertaining and rigorous American pictures of the year. The single explicit nod to Hitchcock only increases the pure fun of the film: the wig
Laure uses to disguise herself early on is black, the same color of Tippi Hedren's in Marnie (1964). Like the way Hedren functioned in that great film, and like Femme Fatale itself, Romijn-Stamos is only mere eye candy at first glance: beneath is a reservoir of deeply felt emotional obligation and revelation.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002