Kritiken

It’s art and trash, just down the hall from one another. Laure gets away clean with the diamonds, while Brian De Palma gets away with transforming the typically alpha-male tropes of the heist movie into a softcore set piece for the ages.

A bubbling cocktail of Double Indemnity meets To Catch a Thief meets Vertigo meets The Double Life of Véronique that kicks you in the head real good right at the first sip and is so smooth going down that, by the time you notice you're drunk, it's too late to care, and there goes willowy Rebecca Romijn, a nesting doll shedding an archetype.

The near-wordless opening jewel heist postpones dialogue as long as possible, an ideal opening setpiece example of De Palma's peculiar take on Pure Cinema, where camera movement is everything and plausibility or dramatic integrity a snide joke. When the self-penned dialogue kicks in it's ripe cheese... The structurally ingenuous finale plays twice, a masterclass in tweaking Rube Goldberg variables as plotting; this is unabashedly virtuoso work with no undue claims on your heart or brain.

It may seem slick, but it isn't all surface — De Palma is too smart for that. Frames are rich with hidden details: Witness, in the opening shot, Romijn's face superimposed repeatedly over Barbara Stanwyck's while Laure watches Double Indemnity. It's a clever visual shorthand for the many identities Laure takes on and the ways women operate in film noir. The film wouldn't work without Romijn's assured performance. She makes a great Hitchcock blonde.

Femme Fatale scoots from one gloriously location-scouted set piece to the next—a vertiginous church, an icy modern hotel, a neon-lit dive bar that's downright ecstatic in gorgeous, low-rent crumminess—and its inscrutable star winds her way from "rotten-to-the-heart" corruption to redemption.

Laure's a blank, omni-sexual, erotically charged nothing. In an alternate universe, one that far too many critics seemed to occupy when Femme Fatale was first released, this could all be dismissed with two judicious swipes, "lousy acting" and "lousy writing." What brilliant casting, though, and what glorious filmmaking—we could never hope to understand Laure, to pin her down, to fix her in a spot; it's what keeps her always ahead of us, completely in control of the film.

It's a bountiful film, one to which the only proper reaction is a giggle of delight and, depending on your predilections, a solid hard-on: the film's opening, an agile set piece following a jewel heist at Cannes' Palais du Cinema, is a checklist of what pleasures moviegoing can afford: of movement (the camerawork is weightless), of the aural (composer Ryuichi Sakamoto's slinky bolero), of the erotic (Rie Rasmussen and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos open-mouth tongue-wrestling in a bathroom stall).

De Palma attempts to catch moments of soulful recognition. In jewel thief Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), De Palma finds all this and more... The resulting film is a De Palma masterpiece, mixing the satirical, sexual, voyeuristic, generational, and hopeful into a wondrous whole. "Only in my dreams," says Laure at the film's close—an awe-inspiring verbal summation of De Palma's views on life, love, and art.

Were it not for fallen auteur Brian De Palma's trademark use of split-screen and sinuous tracking shots, this stupefying, big-budget compendium of erotic thriller cliches might be mistaken for the kind of super-sleazy direct-to-video picture that normally stars Shannon Whirry under the overheated direction of Gregory Hippolyte.

De Palma's brilliant thriller Femme Fatale twists every conceivable slander against it into a sterling asset: It's a showy, derivative, coolly academic piece of trash, disengaged with anything outside itself and its own influences... Femme Fatale makes a rich bouillabaisse out of De Palma's trademark themes and obsessions, stacking references to the heavens and operating with an internal logic that may take several viewings to fully unpack.

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...

In his dazzling and luxuriant new thriller "Femme Fatale," De Palma turns trash into chic. It's a sexy, violent, glamorous, sinfully funny movie with a surface as hard and brilliant as diamonds. De Palma has never been shy about putting his sex fantasies on screen. The sensual possibilities of movies get him buzzing with excitement, and he doesn't hesitate to indulge his own rapturous voyeurism — or to encourage ours.