![]() ![]() Laure’s double-cross happens right there in the frame, in plain view-not that anyone would notice. Her male accomplice takes the glass, and Veronica walks off wearing the diamond-studded bra. In the heist that opens the film, a fit of heavy lesbian erotics (in a ladies room at the Cannes Film Festival, natch) between Laure and Veronica (Rie Rasmussen), a woman wearing a diamond-studded bodice, disguises a clever bait and switch: Laure dismantles the garment, piece by piece, dropping it to the floor for her apparent accomplice (Eriq Ebouaney) to replace with glass-studded knock-offs, but when she drops the bra, she switches the real one with the fake. 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-as Romijn-Stamos embodies her, 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, the only person besides De Palma in the know, no matter how much he teases us by almost letting us in on the joke. She’s a blank, omni-sexual, erotically charged nothing. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, in an audacious bit of casting, brings nothing beyond her formidable body-no star persona, no real talent-to a role that, though it requires chameleon-like transformations and a full repertoire of European accents, barely registers in terms of character. She barely manages more than a sentence through the first reel or so of the film. In the opening shot of the film, she’s a reflected image upon an image-her face superimposed on Stanwyck’s as she sits in front of the television, gorgeous and half-naked. She’s also radically empowered, a clairvoyant, a visionary capable of intuiting her future before it happens, and changing it. Laure is an object of desire she exists to be looked at. The answer is that he’s a bit of both, and that’s never been more true than when it comes to Laure Ash. It’s impossible to say how seriously he takes what he’s doing, whether he’s a perverse and dirty old man or a wickedly adept artist. De Palma’s films often blur the line between indulgence and critique-that’s part of the reason he’s such a controversial and contestable figure. Femme Fatale superficially replaces Hitchcock with film noir as De Palma’s primary reference point, but its central concerns-what it means to look at and to see, to know and to understand-are as grand and summative as anything he’s ever done. In truth, De Palma is neither a misogynist nor a feminist: women are often his camera’s subject and its object, and his films trade on the Hitchcockian fascination with the cinematic image of woman as a locus of desire and violence, attraction and disturbance. So it is that Brian De Palma, that smut-peddling misogynist with a fetish for women naked or dead (or, preferably, both), recuperates the maligned figure of the femme fatale and makes his own grand feminist statement. It’s an intoxicating blend of power and pleasure, so assured that it feels like a revelation: “You don’t have to lick my ass just fuck me.” ![]() ![]() When Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) seduces Nicolas (Antonio Banderas), she’s playing him like a fiddle, but she’s also getting off. No, there’s a vibrant playfulness here, and something more. ![]() Were that all there was to Brian De Palma’s Femme Fatale (2002), though, were it simply an exercise in pastiche and recycled generic tropes, it’d amount to little more than Todd Haynes-lite for the decidedly non-queer crowd- Far from Heaven minus the self-conscious semiotics, the awkward historicism, and the pesky feminism. Like her predecessor, she claims to be “rotten to the heart,” and she wields sex as a weapon-the film’s breathtaking opening heist makes that clear enough. After all, she’s our eponymous femme fatale, made, almost literally, in the image of Barbara Stanwyck. But whoever’s on top, there’s absolutely no doubt who’s in control. “You don’t have to lick my ass,” she says, turning away from him, bending over the table, “just fuck me.” And so he does. ![]()
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