In thrillers from Carrie (1976) and Dressed to Kill (1980) to Snake Eyes (1998) and Femme Fatale, which opened in Baltimore Wednesday, director Brian De Palma has taken Carl Jung's definition of movies as his credo. "The cinema," Jung wrote, "makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be repressed in a humanitarian ordering of life."
In Femme Fatale, De Palma reaches new peaks of "excitement, passion and desirousness." And he does so while analyzing the femme fatale -- the woman who seduces and kills -- with all the relish of Jung taking apart a favorite archetype. De Palma spins a labyrinthine web with the help of two earthy, elegant stars: Rebecca Romijn-Stamos in the title role of a cold-blooded con woman, and Antonio Banderas as a desperate Paris photographer who wants to be her knight in tarnished armor.
The picture hinges equally on an elaborate jewel theft at the Cannes Film Festival and this dangerous dame's extraordinary fantasy life. Generally in interviews, directors protect every tiny surprise in their movies. But De Palma doesn't mind if people go to Femme Fatale knowing that much of it is a lengthy dream sequence. As he revealed in a recent conversation, that attitude comes partly from his desire for the movie to be understood and partly from his belief that the film's sky-high pleasure quotient rests on the extraordinary lengths he's gone to visualize the story.
De Palma loves the movies of David Lynch (Blue Velvet, TV's Twin Peaks) for their delirious, dream-like imagery. Femme Fatale starts with the screening of a movie at Cannes; at one point De Palma wanted Lynch to be the director marching up the Cannes red carpet to present Mulholland Drive. The directors' schedules didn't click. But when De Palma saw Mulholland Drive nine months later and was "knocked out by it," he realized more than ever that he and Lynch are plowing the same turf.
Lynch and De Palma have realized independently that you can't simply transpose a film-noir classic such as Double Indemnity or Sunset Boulevard to the present day. Vintage noir tales of erotic arousal and betrayal, and urban corruption of every sort, unfold in a surreal, chiaroscuro universe shot through with reveries and delusions.
Reviving noir's delicious treacheries calls for a willingness to trailblaze uncharted, unconcious territory. De Palma believes that Lynch "set the new mark" for noir in Mulholland Drive, where he explored the genre's innate surrealism "to the nth degee." But Femme Fatale is right up there with it. It's a virtuoso flight of fancy.
Q: I've read that you were mulling over the idea behind this movie for a while. Is it difficult to describe how it developed?
A: Not at all! First, I like the femme fatale as a character: the seductive spider lady who lures men to their doom. She's cagey and sexy and a lot of fun. But she's really a creation of film noir, and film noir doesn't work in a realistic world.
I agree with the David Lynch approach: you have to work extra hard to do film noir; you can't just take its glamour and its excitement for granted. The whole genre is stylized, strange. I wanted to stick a noir plot into a dream, or vice versa.
My initial idea was that a femme fatale double-crosses everyone during a heist. Her partners relentlessly come after her, almost like the gunmen in The Killers. But when she stumbles into a bar at another town, someone walks over to her and says, "Oh Judy, I'm so sorry about your loss." And when she walks to a bus stop, someone else tells her, "You can't leave town now; the funeral is in 20 minutes." Fortunately for our femme fatale, the real Judy is suicidal -- so it's easy for her to steal Judy's life.
I held onto that idea, and then I thought: What would happen if I made part of the story a dark premonition -- and what if it enabled the femme fatale really to change her life, without downplaying how cynical she will always be for her own self-preservation. I realized that what you'd get is a very tongue-in-cheek happy ending that would drive some people nuts and put a smile on the faces of the others. I knew it was a risky thing to do.
But it made sense to me. Because a lot of this comes from my own life. People write about me as if I'm always cribbing ideas from other movies, as if I'm an empty shell with no experience. But how many times have I been watching a movie late at night and fallen asleep and dreamed the movie? That's exactly what happens at the start of Femme Fatale. I've had dreams that were premonitions and that I tried to prevent from happening. I actually ran into someone who was the exact double of my older brother in Florence, Italy. And when I showed Mission to Mars at the Cannes Film Festival I walked down that red carpet with my girlfriend, who was wearing Chopard jewelry. [Romijn-Stamos steals Chopard jewelry at the start of Femme Fatale.] So I say, write what you know! I'm not sitting in a room watching movies 24 hours a day.
Q: The movie is really about a lot of things, including that now-chic topic of people reinventing themselves; it even has a hint of It's a Wonderful Life.
A: It's fun to stir all these eclectic ingredients into this heist pot. A lot of this movie is about the creative process -- the Orson Welles idea of "catching lightning in a bottle." Antonio Banderas has been there on the balcony of his studio shooting pictures for seven years, trying to get a final piece that will complete this artistic puzzle he's been assembling, and my brother actually took those pictures that you see and put them together over six or seven months. But you won't see this mentioned in reviews!
Q: Maybe that's because this movie entertains or challenges critics in a now unfamiliar way.
A: What's fun about this movie is that it's like a piece of music. All the locations in the dream section of the movie are recapitulated in the conscious sections, maybe with a painting, maybe with a poster. In reality, we always pick things up in our conscious life and blow them out of proportion in our dreams. And without stating that outright as a message or a theme, an audience should feel that process happening in Femme Fatale, thanks to how we develop all this imagery.
I attend a lot of film festivals, and so little is going on in terms of visual storytelling on the screen 99 percent of the time. I understand that films can be driven by political ideas, character, dramatic development. I've done quite a few of those pictures myself. But there's this whole other thing that's been sorely undeveloped over the last couple of decades: using a big canvas and taking visual storytelling as far as you can go on it.
Q: Perhaps because she was a super-model, people don't always give Romijn-Stamos credit for comic timing, but when she bats her eyes at Peter Coyote ...
A: It's hysterical! Hysterical! This poor lost girl crying on the shoulder of this poor sucker on the plane.
Q: And because they peg you as a child of Hitchcock, reviewers don't acknowledge how many other great directors you've gone to school on.
A: Of course, I'm attracted to visual stylists. Yes, Hitchcock, but also Antonioni, Kubrick, because they have such incredible ways of using the camera. Often, they're nonverbal. And don't we have enough talk?
That's another thing I get bothered by. Look, guys: if you want the kind of talk and narrative development that produces stories you know the beginning, middle and end of as soon as you see the opening credits -- just turn the channel! What happened to the big canvas, or to the idea of giving audiences vistas they've never seen before?
Q: It sounds like you're wistful for David Lean movies like Lawrence of Arabia and The Bridge on the River Kwai.
A: David Lean: he did it all. He had an incredible ability to tell stories visually, he traveled all over the world to bring new vistas to audience, he worked with writers like Noel Coward and Robert Bolt on incredible stories. All filmmakers admire David Lean because he shows what you can do when you've got everything working: you can do something big and meaningful. We talk about his movies all the time.
Q: And Orson Welles?
A: Always Orson Welles. From him you learn how to use a group of actors, how to move them around in a certain location and frame them with the camera. The big problem is that you no longer can get American actors who can move the way they do in Welles' films. Very few film actors in America have real stage training any more -- they're used to walking around in a two-shot and having a Steadicam trail behind them. The good thing about Femme Fatale is that actors in France, like actors in London, are always on stage when they're not in movies.
Remember in the old days, when all the major actors pooh-poohed going to Hollywood? All the great roles for actors are still in the theater -- they're certainly not in movies. The new generation of movie actors can't do anything because they have no stage movement or voice training.
Welles could come up with fabulous moves because he had this whole stage-trained troupe -- he could order them to go anywhere and they could do anything. I was looking at the scene in The Manchurian Candidate recently, where the director, John Frankenheimer, is doing his version of the McCarthy hearings. He has two actors improvising the whole thing -- one as McCarthy, one as the Army head who is being attacked -- and Frankenheimer just keeps shooting, holding on one guy and then the other. You can only fantasize about doing that today. The mind boggles: Who the hell could you get to do it?