De Palma: Passion (2012)

Over the past decade, Brian de Palma has been moving steadily away from films designed to be watched in theatres, a tendency that culminates with Passion, his most recent effort. In many ways, it’s a film designed to be viewed on a SmartPhone, rather than viewed at a cinema, not least because it’s about a pair of marketing executives, played by Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams, who spend most of the film ruthlessly competing on a campaign for the latest version of the SmartPhone, known as the OmniPhone. As with so many of de Palma’s earlier films, it’s alive with Hitchcock references and tropes, but it also feels like a bit of a break from his earlier homages – rather than a self-conscious exercise in style, it often plays more like a realist depiction of a world that just happens to have become Hitchcockian in every way. In particular, Hitchcock’s tendency to splinter relationships into complex geometrical configurations of bodies and gazes works quite naturally with the networking that underpins McAdams and Rapace’s competition – there’s no real character development in the film, just a kind of continual mirroring and replication, while every connection or disconnection between the two feels equally inauspicious, part of a healthy network. Insofar as de Palma pioneered neonoir by rediscovering Hitchcock as a noir director, it also feels as if some definite break has been made with his noir lineage - it’s a study in OmniNoir rather than neonoir, often feeling like a mere advertisement for a Noir App that automatically changes every scene into a mise-en-scene. And there’s something automated about the film generally – there’s no sense that de Palma’s camera is distinct from any of the recording devices that it depicts, no sense that it is privileged in any way. Given that most of his directorial signatures – especially tracking-shots and split screens – depended precisely on that distinction, that makes for quite a self-effacing film, culminating with a film-within-the-film that’s more like a film-that-replaces-the-film, since it’s not merely screened but shot within the film, in a kind of test run for the OmniPhone. Still, perhaps that’s what it takes to make a film designed to be shown on a recording device, a film that’s less a matter of production or consumption than produsage, reconstituted each time it is viewed.