Femme Fatale

“Carrie,” “Dressed to Kill,” “Blow Out,” “Body Double, “Scarface,” “The Untouchable,” “Casualties of War,” “Raising Cain,” “Carlito’s Way,” “Mission Impossible,” “Snake Eyes” . . . just to name a few. Brian DePalma specializes in making B-movies with A-movie panache, bringing the high style of European cinema (Hitchcock, Antonioni , etc.) to the good ol’ American movie.

“Femme Fatale” is the kind of movie DePalma’s been making for nearly three decades now—an immaculately crafted filming of an improbably serpentine, circumspect suspense story, with false identities, false starts and stops, and enough sex, violence, and smarmy, dramatic absurdities to string you along for the duration of one of those really, really big buckets of popcorn.

A purloined collection of film noir notions, the movie tells the tale of a multi-million dollar jewel heist that leads to a series of double-crosses involving sex, violence, revenge, and photography. It’s a lurid, convoluted, and tantalizing story. Then again, “Femme Fatale” is more about how it looks and feels than the story it purports to be telling.

Rebecca Romijn-Stamos—the femme fatale in question—can’t act, and neither, really, can Antonio Banderas (neither could, say, Craig Wasson and Melanie Griffith), but that doesn’t matter much in a DePalma movie. The actors here are only chess pieces on the director’s board.

“Femme Fatale” is a terrific exercise in pure style. DePalma’s mastery of whatever it is that film directors do has achieved greatness of an almost tactile quality. This movie has a great feel to it, but not much feeling; a great look without actually looking at anything (except via its peripheral vision). It’s like a really good stage musician’s illusion—it won’t make you think or feel all that much, but it looks great.

Matt Parks (January 31, 2003)