De Palma: Femme Fatale (2002)

Depending on how you look at it, Femme Fatale is either Brian De Palma’s purest Hitchcock tribute or his most lurid, ludicrous Hitchcock parody. Devoid of anything resembling narrative or dialogue, it opens with an extraordinary, forty-minute set piece that takes place at the heart of the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, and proceeds more or less as a series of subsidiary set pieces, most of them revolving around a paparazzo, played by Antonio Banderas, and a woman anxious to protect her identity, played by Rebecca Romijn-Stamos. Most of it is set in Paris, and the European backdrop often recalls Obsession, De Palma’s other purest exercise in Hitchcockian style. Beyond that, it’s hard to describe, except to say that without anything to anchor De Palma’s magnificent set pieces they feel even more intensely cerebral but somehow pulpier and cartoony as well, in a kind of apotheosis of Kitschcock as only De Palma knows how to desecrate and consecrate him. If De Palma’s narrative schemes were always so many bridges between recording devices and reproductive surfaces, those bridges are now well and truly redundant here, if only because anything and everything De Palma’s camera lights upon seems to absorb some of its narrative and reproductive power, remaking or perhaps just demystifying Hitchcock’s privileged, fetished objects as so many concealed cameras in the process. In an infinite mise-en-scene like this, nothing can retain any narrative power for any great length of time, and in the continual rotation of narrative placeholders, the endless carousel of people and objects masquerading as other people and objects, it perhaps makes most sense as De Palma’s tribute to North By Northwest, even if it does open with a truncated screening of Regis Warnier’s East-West. As Hitchcock minus narrative, Hitchcock as pure style and space, it’s not that far removed from the hyperreal hyperbole of some of Raul Ruiz’s Hitchcock tributes either – there’s the same sense that Hitchcock’s realist and dream sequences have been utterly collapsed. And if it is a dream, then it’s a dream – or nightmare – of Cannes, the return of everything repressed by this most conservative of film-festivals, made by an auteur obsessed with what happens when cinema leaves the building, or at least visits the bathroom, while everyone’s still fixated on the screen.