Ray Pride

"Femme Fatale" is Brian DePalma's most elegant waking nightmare (or dreamy terror) in many, many years. I was in happy shock throughout: Fuck!, I had to mutter, slumping all the way back in my seat, this is good, raunchy, sleek, convoluted, profane, obsessive, self-reflexive, self-self-reflexive, sexy, smart, personal, uncompromised. Most people misunderstood the polish of the achingly sincere "Mission to Mars" and prototypical DePalma movies like "Raising Cain" tend to obscure their formal virtues through thematic obsession and narrative mayhem. (Or like "Mission Impossible," they are as obdurate as obsidian against any admiration but for pricey polish.) Yet the Byzantine layering of the veteran director's twenty-third feature is a genuine thriller (and exquisite thriller) from start to finish, aided by Thierry Arbogast's lush cinematography and Ryuichi Sakamoto's drenching and drowning of a score (drawing wittily and emphatically at points from Ravel's "Bolero"). Rebecca Romijn-Stamos is the central fact of this twisty entertainment's thesis: without her emphatic, impertinent beauty, it's unlikely we'd care so much about this wicked fable of female empowerment, Cinderella as quick-change artist with unlimited sexual agency. Merrily, merrily, merrily, film narrative is but a dream. With Antonio Banderas, witty and lithe as a paparazzi-turned-conceptual-artist who sets the plot and the lustier moments into motion; a handful of smaller roles are sweet surprises. Similarly, it would be nefarious to describe the orchestration of the sustained opening heist and its glassy sensuality. 115m.

"Femme Fatale" is now playing.

(2002-11-06)

Also by Ray Pride

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