Lots of typical DePalma stuff here has plenty of voyeurism and film noir. Not a huge Banderas fan but he is okay here. The movie really tries to mess with your head with its narrative and I'm not sure how much I enjoyed trying to figure it out.
"Femme Fatale" is best understood as a game played by Brian De Palma and appreciated by knowing cineastes. It's not about story or characters, but about the construction and manipulation of art.
Antonio Banderas plays Nicolas Bardo, a photographer who has turned his back on photographing celebrities. He now spends his time living in an apartment, making huge composite images by arranging tiny photographs. The Bardo character, in many ways, is Brian De Palma. At war with Hollywood storytelling (which is fuelled by celebrity) De Palma takes these multiple images and weaves them into a tapestry until a final image is made. The point is that the final image is not reality. It is the artists recreation and completely false.
At the end of the film, Bardo completes his masterpiece by inserting a little white figure (of Laura) onto his wall. The figure doesn't belong there, Bardo simply chooses to put it there. Thematically, "Femme Fatale" ends on the same note. Noir fatalism is thwarted by a completely arbitrary, totally ILLOGICAL and cosmically IMPOSSIBLE moment of editing whereby De Palma redeems his hero and kills off her opponents.
Critics call this sequence implausible. But De Palma's point is that it doesn't have to be plausible. Bardo puts the white figure on his wall because he wants to. Similarly, De Palma ends the film as he does, because he wants to. He shows us Laura's depressing noir dream and then rescues her from it. He makes it clear that he is redeeming her and willing this positive ending into existence solely because he as an artist (noir God), has the power to do so.
This flips the usual noir logic. If Kubrick's "The Killing" highlights the deterministic law of the universe (Clay's plan crumbling to pieces all because of a random poodle), De Palma's "Femme Fatale" highlights the power of the artist, able to do recreate a universe entirely devoid of cosmic law.
This theme is also highlighted by the use of the name "Bardo", a Tibetan word meaning "intermediate state". A state between life and death. Over the course of the film, Bardo will be caught between life and death, as De Palma toys with killing him. Bardo's existence or artistic merit is down to an artist's mere whim.
Everything else about De Palma is present in Femme Fatale: the voyeur and his object, the representation inside the representation, the original and its fake copy, the doubled characters, key episodes built from multiple points of views, the elaborate camera work.
Watch as De Palma's camera continuously misleads our eyes, giving the hidden predominance over the shown, until we are forced to separate in our minds the real from its representation and to connect the different pieces into a "sense".
This technique comprises the film watching experience as a whole, and is what De Palma's films are essentially about, from Jack Terry's reconstruction of a truth with the aid of montage in "Blow Out", to Santoro's investigations of a crime from partial testimonies in "Snake Eyes".
This theme, the division between reality and image, has grown increasingly important for De Palma. His last five movies ("Redacted", "Dahlia", "Mission Impossible", "Snake Eyes," and "Mission to Mars,") were all concerned with how we see and watch movies. He is obsessed with reminding us that information is not the same thing as knowledge.
"Snake Eyes" opened with an unbroken tracking shot that laid out the plot. The rest of the movie was a demonstration of why everything we had seen in that sequence was a lie. The opening sequence of "Mission: Impossible" showed us Tom Cruise's crew of agents being picked off one by one. We had already seen each of those murders, though, in nearly subliminal blips during the movie's credit sequence (information without knowledge). "Black Dahlia" and "Redacted" similarly deal with a search for truth amongst an image bank of lies.
"Femme Fatale" begins with a long heist sequence. Throughout this sequence, allusions are made to "Snake Eyes" (eg- the literal "serpent camera" and the object of the heist, a snake shaped piece of gold), De Palma effectively saying: "I'm lying to you. The camera is a snake and not to be trusted." Note the film "Est - Ouest" showing as the heist goes on. Another stream-of-consciousness film with an unreliable narrator.
The rest of "Femme Fatale" takes a "dream within a film" approach, (foreshadowed in opening shot). De Palma sets the dream sequence up with careful details: the storm, the clock (Time: 3:33), the water running, Laura sinking. Signs that would eventually emerge all the way through, emphasising the surreal atmosphere of Laura's adventure.
From here on, logic will be put aside as De Palma's mise-en-scene develops into pure form. Everything is disconnected, dialogue makes no sense (at some points it's dubbed without even following the actors' lips), time jumps back and forth etc.
During the dream, Laura will embody different female archetypes, all traceable in film history and particularly in De Palma's films. She's Kim Novak in "Vertigo" and also Melanie Griffith's prostitute of "Body Double" and so on and so on.
The majority of De Palma's films have dream sequences. Even a "serious" film like 'Casualties of War' ends with a character waking up on a train, realising that the whole film was a nightmare. Why does De Palma feel the need to insert this? My guess is that he doesn't want his films to be seen as "real". They exist in a wholly metaphysical space.
As usual with a De Palma film, critics and audiences rejected Femme Fatale. But this is a brilliant film, it's only flaw being an unimaginatively shot (by De Palma standards) heist sequence.
En Femme Fatale (E.U., 2002), la acción principal se desarrolla en Francia (como en Nikita/Luc Besson/1990), justo en medio del Festival de Cannes. Lo interesante de este trabajo de Brian de Palma, es la reelaboración que hace de la clásica mujer fatal, propia de los film noir, aunque más moderna y que incluso puede darse el lujo de un arrebato lésbico. En esa escena, la femme fatale del título (Rebeca Romjin) ejecuta el robo de una enorme joya, en una secuencia montada con eficacia al compás de una pieza musical inspirada en El Bolero de Ravel (música de Ryuichi Sakamoto). Por cierto, la joya la lleva puesta una modelo, en la alfombra roja de la premiere de Este-Oeste (Régis Wargnier, 1999), protagonizada por la actriz francesa Sandrine Bonnaire, quien hace un cameo junto a Wargnier.
De Palma cuenta una historia de tintes oníricos, sobre la redención de una mujer que se dedica al crimen por encargo. A través de varios episodios, veremos la persecución de la que es objeto Laura Ash, mujer experta en robos arriesgados. Todo empieza cuando Laura toma el lugar de una viuda en un vuelo hacia los E.U., donde conocerá a Bruce (Peter Coyote), futuro embajador estadounidense en Francia, con quien se casará.
No estamos ante el mejor De Palma, especialista en retratos de los bajos mundos del hampa (algunos latinizados), pero sigue demostrando la fuerza narrativa con la que aborda sus historias de mafiosos y crímenes. Porque siempre habrá un crimen de por medio y una bella mujer. Más en http://pantallanueve.blogspot.com
there are two really hot scenes in this movie. and of course there's antonio.
but i didn't really like the plot. i expected something different.
still ... i'm sure the director and his crew did a great job - but i can't give more than 2 stars.
De Palma has outdone himself with this erotic thriller! It has twists and turns and along the way is visually stunning ala Palma style. One of his best hands down!
An excellent movie by De Palma...
There's some pretty sexy and hot scenes, you never know where's De Palma is leading you through the whole movie...
Femme Fatale, is a story about a pretty sexy seductive woman, called Laure (Rebecca Romijn). And that women knows how to seduce a man, to turn him on. She double-crosses her partners on a diamond robbery in Cannes during the annual festival. But 7 years later her ex partnerthat got caught got out of jail, and seek for revenge...
u can just sit on yr seat and enjoy the easy, nice n hot! story which is told with fewest words possible. the music is good and the photography is remarkable. this is wat i like about Depalma the most. he knows the camera
É bacana, muito bem dirigido e com ambientação perfeita.
O problema é que tudo parece calculado demais: desde o clima noir-sexy até as fórmulas dos filmes de ação, passando pelos clichês lynchnianos, que aparecem a todo momento, sem que, infelizmente, façam jus à fonte. Parece um daqueles casos em que o conteúdo não é ruim, mas perde em originalidade e é sufocado pela forma.
Para fechar, eu ainda não consegui gostar realmente de nenhuma atuação do Banderas em Hollywood.
usually i saw this movie till the moment where they stole the diamonds but finally i saw it till the end... it is pretty good
you can see here how one moment can affect your life.
I know I liked this more than most. I also know that DePalma can overdo it, however I thought he kept this one together and made it work. Recommended for those who like a bit of suspense and some twists.
not the femme fetale im thinking or expecting for, i want it the like of le femme nikita, but its also a interesting movie to watch.. besides its antonio bandera whom im watching for..
It's as if De Palma decided to synthesize everything he's ever done right into a two-hour thesis film. I usually don't like twisty movies, but this is audacious and jaw-droppingly cinematic.
DePalma Is One of My Fav Directors The Movie Is Really good But Clearly Banderas Was A VERY Bad Choice He Can't Act For Sure but Rebbeca Romijn Is Sexy As Hell And SHe Was A Great CHoice
Another intricated cinephile masturbation by DePalma, though his virtuous and stylish mise-en-scene is always present. fun and sexy, especially for the soundtrack and Rebecca Romijn's presence.
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