Double Vision
In Femme Fatale, the movies’ most gifted voyeur serves a feast for the eyes
by Jim Ridley
Femme Fatale
dir.: Brian De Palma
R, 110 min.
Now showing at area theaters
A witty, subversive gadget freak with a telescopic sight for an eye and a yen for conspiracy scenarios, Brian De Palma is the second gunman overlooking the grassy knoll of American movies. He’s also the wiseguy who caught the whole crime on film, only to find out nobody will listen. These two figures—the conspirator and the voyeur—recur like countermelodies in the elegant suspense thrillers De Palma has made his domain since the mid-1970s. Within the scope of these two perspectives, you’ll find the sensibility of the guy who made paranoid fever dreams like Blow Out and Dressed to Kill: movies where everyone is watching and everyone is being watched.
To his many haters, De Palma’s an irrelevant show-off who only makes movies about the movies he’s seen. I would argue that he makes movies about a world alternately besotted, lulled, hoodwinked and alienated by a century of passive voyeurism—and that he doesn’t exempt himself. Eyesight itself depends on two fields of view adjusted into one: It’s the principle of binocular vision, in which the mind reconciles the twin views on either side of the nose to perceive depth and space. Something crazily similar is going on in the split screens, multiple perspectives and shifting vantage points of De Palma’s movies, which prevent us from placing too much trust in any single image. The proof is in his latest film, a diversion with the collar-grabbing title Femme Fatale.
On one viewing, Femme Fatale appears a deliberately excessive caper thriller, a triumph of high style and visual command over cheerfully unhinged plotting. Look closer, though, and you’ll find an intricate symbolic order that shows De Palma has more in mind than pretty surfaces and a game of Spot That Reference. On one level, it’s absolutely about the ways we respond to movies and the sometimes contradictory things we want from entertainment. But it’s also a morality play of disarming conviction, one that finds De Palma using his split screens and visual fragmentation to evoke the yearnings of a divided self.
Doubles figure extensively in Femme Fatale, starting with the image of Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity on a hotel-room TV. The movie isn’t about her, though: It’s about the indistinct blur reflected in the screen, which is gradually revealed to us as a woman named Laure (played by Rebecca Romijn-Stamos). The TV screen functions as a mirror, but it isn’t just Stanwyck reflected back at Laure: It’s also Fred MacMurray’s love-struck patsy. In this one shot, De Palma shows us the reflection of a woman who sees in herself both the cold-blooded mankiller and the compromised but wised-up good guy.
Laure is joined by an accomplice, the sinister Black Tie (Eriq Ebouaney), who briefly goes over a scheme to steal a $10 million jewelry set during a gala at the nearby Cannes Film Festival. This sets up the first of De Palma’s elaborate, beautifully organized set pieces, as the action switches to the festival’s red carpet. Disguised as a photographer, Laure bewitches the jewelry model into a ladies-room tryst. The resulting caper cuts amusingly among several different sets of voyeurs: an audience in a movie theater, a thief with a serpentine camera extension, a roomful of surveillance technicians hooting at starlets on the security monitors. The only person who isn’t peeping is Black Tie; his eyes are on the jewels.
There is a double cross, and Laure escapes with the loot. Thanks to the contrivances of the plotting—something De Palma breezes past with amusing flippancy—it turns out that she has an exact double, a woman whose identity she slips into with alarming ease. What the director does at this point is so breathtaking in its audacity and complexity that a second viewing is essential. On one level, he gives us two narratives to satisfy our contradictory desires as moviegoers: one that indulges our curiosity about how naughty Laure can be, and one that engineers the happy ending that we generally want for the main character in a light entertainment. On a deeper level—and this is far trickier—he immerses a character in a dream-like parallel destiny, as her waking conscience and consciousness try to alert her to an alternate path.
That certainly explains the movie’s many scenes involving churches and crosses. It also explains the split screens, which suggest that even the darkest of lives has unexplored options. Laure is the latest De Palma hero, like telekinetic Carrie White or the gangster bound by thug life in Carlito’s Way, whose very skill resigns her to a life she doesn’t want. In this regard, it’s tempting to see her as a reflection of her creator, who has complained that his wise-guy rep and showman’s flair keep people from seeing anything but cheap thrills in his movies. The giddy flourish that closes Femme Fatale—a slow-motion showstopper that metes out redemption and retribution in a brilliantly executed montage—grants them both a future they’ve earned.
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