If you liked Mulholland Drive, you'll love Femme Fatale: It's the most uninhibited piece of moviemaking to open in Baltimore since Y Tu Mama Tambien.

Brian De Palma, the director of Carrie and Dressed to Kill and those under-attended masterpieces, Blow Out and Casualties of War, hasn't lost the bad-boy glint in his lens. This darkly funny story about a cold-blooded, Paris-based con woman named Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) and the most charming dupe in the world, a photographer named Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas), is convoluted and lucid, scabrous and elegant. It rockets into a world of sexual and criminal duplicity - and then keeps soaring, becoming simultaneously an edge-of-your-seat entertainment and an out-of-body experience.

Is Femme Fatale about anything beyond dishonor among thieves? Well, on the picture's own pop terms, it's about everything: finding your moral footing and earning trust in a world of ruptured loyalties; trying on identities until you find the one that fits; staying true to friends and taking a chance on love. In the movie's wrap-up, De Palma attains what he only promised in his previous Mission to Mars: An adult, hard-boiled sweetness.

The bravura opening sequence traces a jewel heist, at once glamorous and lowdown, that's executed in a bathroom during a gala at the Cannes Film Festival. As the bisexual Laure prepares for her no-holds-barred seduction of a female mark, she, her boss and their collaborators glide through an erotic dance scored to a Bolero-like rhythm and melody - while De Palma integrates surgical split-screen images, voluptuous camera movements and pulsating, variable slow motion.

Part of the movie's excitement derives from a wicked clarity. Femme Fatale makes us feel we know exactly how a master plan fits together, precisely where it goes awry. Much of the time, we don't know the most essential thing about the heist: each character's motives. By the end, they kick in with a wallop.

The whole movie gets its charge from a jaw-dropping blend of sensuality and calculation. De Palma achieves the surreal, intensified emotion of silent thrillers through nonstop audacity and invention, the way Fritz Lang did in Spies and Dr. Mabuse. Laure escapes to Paris, where she assumes the identity of a grieving woman who's just lost her husband and child and is about to fly to the United States. On the plane she meets an American software tycoon turned public servant who pities her plight.

De Palma pulls off each of these narrative leaps with the aplomb of a champion high-diver; he nails every shift visually, then moves on. After Laure returns to Paris with her American (now the ambassador!), and hides from the camera to shield her past, it makes perfect movie sense that the focus shifts to Banderas' Nicolas Bardo. De Palma has connected the two of them in our minds with a complex dream logic: We've seen the photographer snap a shot of her in front of a church seven years before.

Nicolas, now broke from working on an art project, takes a tabloid assignment to grab a picture of her. The bulk of the movie pivots on his guilty conscience for invading her privacy - and her total lack of conscience. In the background, still simmering, are the after-effects of the heist. When the action ripples out in wider circles, the emotional vortex set off by this grand larceny never loses its power.

Stamos has a superb, knowing control of all her melodramatic and low-comic effects: She creates an ultra-provocative vamp who at times can't help bubbling over with a golly-gee euphoria at her own amazing luck. Her ebullience is what makes us feel she's salvageable. And Banderas is at his loosey-goosey best as a man who commits the error of feeling protective for a stronger, more savvy woman. He gives his nascent-artist character the right comic emphasis - a light air of rue, as if he's in recovery from moral and aesthetic failure. Banderas' talent for parodying romantic ardor is perfect for a fellow whose acts of chivalry backfire.

With these two actors, De Palma delivers a series of knockout dramatic punch lines that are also scintillating preludes to a grand summation. Femme Fatale is It's A Wonderful Life as only De Palma could remake it: a Christmas gift for boys and girls who are nice and naughty.

Femme Fatale

Starring Rebecca Romijn-Stamos and Antonio Banderas

Directed by Brian De Palma

Released by Warner Bros.

Rated R

Time 112 minutes