Femme Fatale, 2002

Additional Captures

Director and Screenwriter: Brian De Palma

Co-Stars: Rebecca Romijn-Stamos (Laure Ash/Lily); Peter Coyote (Bruce Watts); Gregg Henry (Leonard Shiff)

Studio: Warner Bros./Quinta Communications

Release Date: November 8, 2002

Filming: Paris and Cannes

International con artist/thief Laure Ash helps pull off a diamond robbery in Cannes during the annual film festival. She double-crosses her partners-in-crime and makes off with the diamonds to Paris where she accidentally assumes the identity of a distraught widow. One shooting, one betrayal, and one suicide later, Laure is on a plane to the United States playing a victim open to the consolation of the kindly Bruce Hewitt Watts (Peter Coyote). Seven years later, Watts is the American ambassador to France and Laure is his wife. Because her former accomplice is out of prison and looking for her, she has become publicity shy. Enter photographer Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas), who snaps a picture of Laure, sells it for five figures to a tabloid, then regrets his actions and tries to apologize to the injured party. This act of contrition unwittingly plunges him into a scheme of murder and double-crossing, and sets the stage for a motion of events as the evil Laure resorts to low, underhanded means to protect her former identity by emotionally and financially destroying Nicolas while evading her former partners-in-crime still looking for her to reclaim the stolen diamonds.

While the film did not garner rave reviews or success at the box office, it is clear from the critics’ reviews why Antonio was so anxious to work with a director of De Palma’s caliber:

Charles Taylor, salon.com:

“Movies are never so much fun as when they contain an element of the disreputable. The appeal of cheap, trashy movies, with their fantasies of sex and violence, is that they lure us in with the promise of the pleasurable forbidden. A lurid and colorful Italian horror movie, a slick piece of Eurotrash exploitation, a shoot'em-up from Korea or Hong Kong can go directly to our pleasure center in ways that worthy, virtuous, dull movies can't. Movies can of course be so much more than genre and exploitation pictures. But there's an immense, nearly sexual satisfaction in movies that haven't lost touch with the tawdry sources that give movies their particular, visceral energy. A master of the medium who exults in trickery and sex appeal, Brian De Palma takes the stuff of cheap movies and invests them with a wicked luster. 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. De Palma delights in giving his kinky daydreams the most chic settings imaginable. Here, it's Paris…Watching ‘Femme Fatale’ is like being given a plush, comfy seat at the swankiest peep show in town. It's a supremely relaxing turn-on. You sink into the luxury of the movie even as you're watching in anticipation to see where it will go next. It's easy to imagine De Palma eager to get to the set each day to unleash some sinuous camera move, to hear an actor deliver an outlandish piece of dialogue, to devise new ways of pulling the rug out from under the audience. Yet his technique is the opposite of flashy. De Palma has…never stopped developing and transforming his favorite devices -- split screen, slow motion, cameras that prowl the sets in long, unbroken shots. The confidence he has long shown has only deepened with each new movie. He has mastered the assurance that is the true mark of sophisticated moviemaking…De Palma makes a joke of our gullibility and gets us to laugh at how easy it is to be suckered -- and how much fun it is.

‘Femme Fatale’ makes the link to movie-fed fantasies explicit from the get-go. The picture's first shot is the femme fatale of the title, Laure (Rebecca Romjin-Stamos), reflected in a TV set watching the apotheosis of femme fatales, Barbara Stanwyck in ‘Double Indemnity’. When the curtains of her hotel room open, we're looking out onto the red carpet as stars arrive for the gala opening of the Cannes Film Festival. Laure is part of a gang of thieves who are aiming to steal a jewel-encrusted serpent that a sleek model (Rie Rasmussen) is wearing to the festival as a barely-there halter top…Of course, things don't go as planned, and Laure winds up on the run from her partners. She resurfaces as Lily, the French wife of an American ambassador (Peter Coyote). A tabloid editor who has noticed that no one has a picture of Lily hires Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas), a deeply in-debt photographer, to obtain one. He does, and Laure/Lily sets out to salvage her cover. It would be spoiling the fun to describe any more of the plot than that, except to say it operates on a very high level of game playing. ‘Femme Fatale’ has a generic noirish title, but its naughty sense of fun and of the sexiness of danger winds up making most noir seem rather prim. The sentimentality of noir derives from the cruel twists of fate suffered by the losers and no-accounts who populate the genre. De Palma is too much of a satirist to easily give himself over to the doomed romantic fatalism of noir. He uses noir conventions to make a grand joke about fate, to find yet another way of upsetting the audience's expectations, something in which he has specialized. ‘Femme Fatale’ is the first movie he's made in which fate can not only be cruel but also fortuitous, as liable to deliver a windfall as a disaster.

…The jewel heist, which involves a steamy seduction, a good, corrupt security guard, and a mischievous kitty cat, is laid out like a mosaic with the various elements coming inexorably together. ‘Femme Fatale’ is itself something of a mosaic. The photo collage that Banderas' Nicolas assembles out of snapshots of the Parisian street his apartment [overlooks]…is a visual metaphor for the movie -- an overview assembled out of bits and pieces. In one of the movie's most breathtaking shots we see a split screen of the actual street next to Nicolas' collage. It's a neat metaphor for the split between art and life, between what we think we see and what's actually there. That theme -- the division between reality and image -- has grown increasingly important for De Palma...He is obsessed with reminding us that information is not the same thing as knowledge.

We are constantly being misled in ‘Femme Fatale’. De Palma drops only the slyest hints…to clue us in to what's actually going on. All of his familiar visual trademarks are here -- the slow motion, the split screen, the prevalence of cameras (photographers are everywhere in the movie)…It's a playful movie, but De Palma's technique is its own sort of meat, so far beyond what other directors are capable of that their most sincere movies can seem like trifles in comparison. Befitting a director who keeps reminding us how easily our eyes can deceive us, ‘Femme Fatale’ is a demonstration of the seductiveness of surfaces. It's a ravishing-looking movie…De Palma renders Paris as the meeting place of traditional European elegance and cold high-tech. It's an autumnal-looking movie heated by a low, steady smolder…Considering that women have so often been the victims in De Palma's movies, it might seem odd for him to make a movie where the femme is fatale. But the charges of misogyny that feminists have loved to lob at him ignored the fact that De Palma's sympathies were always with the women. His great recurring theme of tortured male chivalry, the man who is unable to save the woman, reflected a deep ambivalence about traditional masculinity (and the way the movies have taught us to worship it)…And I wonder how many people will notice that, in ‘Femme Fatale’, women save the lives of other women again and again. Among the things he's playing with here is the archetypal noir figure of the killer woman. De Palma winds up giving us a reason to like Laure, though he doesn't need to. Goody-goody heroines have never fared well on screen, and Laure is so deliciously bad that she wins our hearts immediately. ‘I'm a bad, bad girl,’ she says to Banderas at one point, and we're in no position to argue. De Palma is obviously using Romijn-Stamos here for her gorgeous looks, the slightly wide mouth, and the hint of mischief in her eyes that keeps her from being a bland all-American beauty. Swaddled in furs and a scarf,…Kitted out in leather and sublimely slinky La Perla undies, she's the baddest hooch-bar hottie…Romijn-Stamos matches up perfectly with Banderas, who proves once again that he's at his sexiest when he's being funny (and that he's never more endearing than when he's being besieged). Their encounters have real heat, and the way she takes charge of the situation is marvelously raunchy. (It's a neat joke that she's taller than he is.)

…It's in the movie's climax that De Palma shows just how much of a trickster he can be. Among other things, the finale is a joke on the twist endings that some recent hits have foisted, straight-faced, on their audiences. He includes an uncharacteristically sentimental scene only to give it a deadly little fillip in what follows…De Palma gives us a happy ending that is also one of his great sick jokes. Maybe that's the type of happy ending closest to his heart. In any event, you couldn't be blamed for purring with contentment. In the world of ‘Femme Fatale’, we're all naughty kitty cats.”

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times:

“Sly as a snake, ‘Femme Fatale’ is a sexy thriller that coils back on itself in seductive deception. This is pure filmmaking, elegant and slippery. I haven’t had as much fun second-guessing a movie since ‘Mulholland Drive’…This movie is about watching and being watched, about seeing and not knowing what you see…The movie’s story…is a series of incidents that would not be out of place in an ordinary thriller, but here achieve a kind of transcendence, since they are what they seem, and more than they seem, and less than they seem. The movie tricks us, but not unfairly, and for the attentive viewer there are markers along the way to suggest what De Palma is up to. Above all, he is up to an exercise in superb style and craftsmanship.”

Manohla Dargis, Times Staff Writer:

“’Femme Fatale’ is all about looking. It’s about noticing everything in the frame and understanding how movies make meaning with images, and not only plot and dialogue. There isn’t a single wasted or empty shot in the film; everything counts…[It] doesn’t have culture or politics on its feverish mind, but it would be a mistake to underplay now smart it is or to think that it isn’t slipping us ideas in between all that technique. Here, the message is the moviemaking and the unparalleled joy you get from a film that can carry you off so completely, making you forget about everything save for the beautiful lies in front of you.”

Joe Leydon, San Francisco The Examiner:

“Ingeniously twisty and audaciously twisted…one of the most exuberantly mischievous self-parodies ever attempted by a major American filmmaker…I’ll refrain from making detailed comments, pro or con, about the lead performances [of Antonio and Rebecca], if only to avoid the temptation to explain why they’re better than you might think.”

Synopsis by Lisa