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femme fatale

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grant
May 09 2003
08:17 am

I finally saw it! And just like all of Brian DePalma’s films, I had average expectations that were far exceeded. His movies are like a feast, visually and in the thoughts that follows. It’s great to see an expert craftsman at work. I can’t think of many directors who explore eroticism and our voyeuristic culture as well as DePalma. This time he focuses on the Princess Di—paparazzi relationship. Very thought-provoking. If you haven’t seen it, you must. Who has seen it? We have plenty to talk about!

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JabirdV
May 09 2003
08:37 am

I think it’s on my NetFlix list. I haven’t had a chance to see that one yet.

Not get too far off topic, I saw the up and coming Banderas film: Once Upon A Time In Mexico (Rodriguez’s thrid installment of El Mariachi/Desperado) and it was hysterical. Johnny Depp did a phenomenal job and wore some wacked out T-shirts to boot.

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grant
May 09 2003
10:24 am

I haven’t seen many films with Banderas in them, but I was charmed by his character in this one.

I would be more than willing to discuss any of DePalma’s work if you haven’t seen his newest, especially “Dressed to Kill” and “Body Double”. Would anyone like to quibble with me about the mastery of DePalma? ‘Cause I’ll quibble.

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Dave
May 13 2003
06:54 pm

OK Grant,

I picked up a pirated dvd copy on the street in Peru for 7 soles ($2) and was disappointed. Why was it so great? Personally, I thought it could’ve used a little more chocolate and not as much *ss (can we say that on *cino?). Acting was pretty poor. What am I missing?

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grant
May 14 2003
08:19 am

Femme Fatale? One of the amazing things about it is that it’s fun to watch, a thriller in the conventional sense, but the treatment of the genre is so smart…AND you end up thinking alot about it afterwards (not a common experience for most “suspense-thrillers” nowadays).

DePalma’s films are also fun because they’re not agenda-driven or motivated by some philosophical or ideological statement he wants to make, but form-driven. DePalma just wants to see what can be done with images and sound and different arrangements of these elements, thus letting the film tell its own story. What ends up happening in his best films is that we get visual parallels and references that actually do start to make us think about issues in the end, but in a way that’s more natural to the essence of film.

It makes sense that film has the power, in and of itself, to raise issues of importance and questions to ponder. As human beings, we SEE our way through this world, while awake and also as we sleep. Film, then, is awfully relevant to everyday human experience, in and of itself. Film doesn’t need an extra literary narrative or theatrical story-telling device attached to it because film already speaks to us very deeply, of its own power.

DePalma’s filmatic experiment with time during Femme Fatale is a great example of how film drives its own narrative. DePalma’s own experiment with time as a director in the editing room gets expressed in the main character’s own story, which moves ahead and then is reflected back upon itself after the dream sequence comes full circle (DePalma’s own life-experience is reflected in the opening sequence, as well, which was inspired by the opening of one of his films at Cannes). The narrative story of Femme Fatale arises out of the movement and form of the film itself. DePalma allows his own cinematic experimentation and visual sense to drive the story, rather than the other way around (I was trying to criticize theatre for often doing things “the other way around” in earlier posts).

DePalma shows himself to really care about film because he follows it wherever it leads, he doesn’t manipulate it with storytelling devices belonging to the world of literature or theatre or philosophy, which have all proven themselves to be inferior to the power of film in this day and age.

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DvdSchp
May 15 2003
02:56 pm

Ah, film talking about film. I think you know my opinion on that matter, and I don’t feel like getting into an argument about that.
I haven’t seen his entire body of work, but he just seems to rehash things in uninteresting ways… Perhaps Femme Fatale is different, but Obsession is Veritgo, Scarface is Scarface (or any other gangster picture basically), Snake Eyes is just a pointless amalgemation of Hitchcock camerawork. The Untouchables, which I do like, has this odd allusion to Battleship Potemikin in it, which I realize was inserted by screenwriter Mamet, but was there a point to that? I’m honestly asking, because I can’t stand meaningless allusions. Maybe his earlier ones are better.
DePalma always seemed like Hitchcock reincarnated as Jerry Bruckenheimer anyway.
How does Misson to Mars fit into all this? Or Carrie or Mission Impossible?

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grant
May 15 2003
04:54 pm

Doh! You mentioned all the films I was hoping to avoid. I am most exclusively talking about “Dressed to Kill”, “Body Double” and “Femme Fatale” when I mention the brilliance of DePalma. I haven’t seen “Raising Cain”, but I suppose that might be included as well.

I would say DePalma transcends the rehashing of Hitchcock mostly because I see DePalma as operating in the spirit of Hitchcock rather than simply stealing Hitchcockian techniques or stories (like that movie where Michael Douglas gets caught up in a “life or death struggle”game—is it called THE GAME?—or any other thriller Hollywood puts out). You could blame more than half of our movies today for rehashing Hitchcock in one way or another, but DePalma returns to the Hitchcock process in order to let film speak. I know Tarkovsky considered Hitchcock to be a pimp of many movie-industry whores, but I would suggest, in Tarkovsky’s absence, that Hitchcock did allow film to tell its own story (we don’t have to go there if you don’t want, but you can engage the argument about film having its own narrative apart from the script and the page, can’t you?).

Anyway, I’m still new to DePalma, but I’ve been consistently amazed at his artistry, maybe because I haven’t seen Snakeyes or Obsession yet. And I forgot about Mission to Mars.

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DvdSchp
May 17 2003
08:31 am

Oh, definately. Film does have its own narrative apart from the script. It’s a part of film that I believe most people (including myself) don’t always see or are even aware of. The reason I like film is that its so much richer when you start noticing that side of it. And I also think you’re dead on in saying that Hitchcock let film speak its own story, and that’s one of the reasons why he was so good, but he also knew how to comminucate AND to engage his audience broadly. I’ll get to that later.

Well, I saw it this morning. I felt kind of weird renting the thing from a small town video store where the clerk knows who I am. “I would also like a copy of Showgirls… the uncut version…”
I really wanted to like this movie. I told myself before I started that I would like it, but I just couldn’t make myself. I’m sorry. I realize voyuerism is DePalma’s thing, and that its extremely prominant in this film, but it doesn’t interest me all that much, so I have nothing to say about that side of this movie.
Whether DePalma is a cheap rip off of Hitchcock or follows in his spirit is debatable. Obviously they are two different filmmakers no matter how similar, but I will say this about Hitchcock: he draws in the audience. I feel that’s the fatal flaw of Femme Fatale, which attempts to push the audience away at every turn. Even before you see the movie, this happens. You know the main character will be percisely what it states in the title, and she is nothing more than that. It makes for a movie that is just not human in anyway. I realize that by criticizing the character development and saying that Lily is completely unsympathitic I’m holding the film to standard perhaps more often and accurately used for literature, and by doing so I am not letting film be film, as you’ve been arguing. I agree with you entirely by letting film be film, but any piece of art needs to hold some sense of human-ness, otherwise, who cares?
Anyway, it does many other things to distance us besides the title. -Note: if you’re reading this and don’t want to know key plot twists, stop reading.— The whole dream within a dream concept only hurts the movie because it doesn’t let the film itself be the dream. Pulling us out of the flow of the movie is the equivelent to DePalma shoving us back into our seats and yelling “This is a movie!” If you’re trying to communicate your film as dream-like, this is not helping. And this film had split screen in it, which only hurts the film as well, because suddenly, you don’t know where to look. I realize this is probably his intention for using it, but again we get pushed back.
My big problem with this is his reworking of the film noir genre, which he basically eviscerates. It’s almost as if he extracted all the academic studies of that genre and put it on screen. Going back to the Lily character, she simply is not an effective femme fatale because she never gets a chance to weave her web of deciet. At no time during the film do we think she is anything but extremely manipulative and ruthless. Grant, did you watch the DVD, and if so, did you watch the featurettes as well? There was a point at which DePalma outright said that he decided to make this a dream within a dream movie because film noir has such a dreamlike quality. I think that sums up so many things about how DePalma approaches filmmaking, which is distance, self-aware and idea driven… bascially the polar opposite of film noir (with the exception of a lot of later film noir and New Wave noir, including Touch of Evil, which I like very much but for different reasons). I kept thinking that I’d much rather be watching something like The Big Sleep, which is one of my favorites. Here’s a movie that is, I believe, very filmic without being painfully self-aware. I love watching this movie, and I can do it over and over again, something that DePalma, in one of those featurettes, felt was the strength of Femme Fatale. Well, I didn’t want to, but what he meant by that basically was that there are all this little details that you didn’t pick up the first time, which to me is the equivalent of having someone explain a how he did a card trick right after performing it. It may be nice to see all details but then why would you want to see it again? The Big Sleep is like watching a great dream over and over. What seperates The Big Sleep from it’s relatives like The Maltese Falcon is that usually noir is very story driven. The plot is so tight that every word advances the story. The Big Sleep is so insanely complex that after about 15 minutes you simply stop trying to stay with the story, not just because its hard to follow, but because its much more interesting to watch Lauren Bacall and Bogie interact. Scenes stand by themselves and the dialogue is so fantastic you’re listening to the words and the poetry rather than how the effect where the story is going. And this movie is so sexy, but indirectly, unlike Femme Fatale, which is more intentional titilation of the audience. Femme Fatale has depictions of sexuality and The Big Sleep has tone and mood. I find that to be much deeper and dreamlike than watching Lily strip. Of course, I’ve never had a sex dream, so I could be wrong. Sexy dreams, but not sex.
I had more to say but I forgot. Basically DePalma communicates ideas through pictures well and that’s about it, nothing human. I couldn’t help but think of a bit from Boogie Nights where Ricky Jay’s characters has moved up from DP to director and is using this new thing called video tape to record to women going at it in the hottub. He says “Yeah, that’s good technically, but it lacks passion.”

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DvdSchp
May 17 2003
08:40 am

A quick correction: after reading an earlier post, I would agree that DePalma is not idea driven, which I said, but more about form. That doesn’t change my argument a whole lot because that simply makes the film pure form and no content. To cite Grandmaster Stanely Kubrick, it’s like the difference between Chaplin and Eisenstien films. Chaplin is all content and no form, Eisenstein is all form and no content. Neither are entirely satisfying. DePalma seems to be all form.
I realize the whole form/content concept is debateable, but I’m just using it to make a point.

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joelspace
May 17 2003
09:38 am

I would be interested in a film history or aesthetics course that approaches things from this perspective. Looking for the humaness in the artform. Although I felt I needed to see the ‘classic’ films that I saw in my film classes at Purdue, I didn’t sense a soulfullness in most of them. It seemed to be more about the inovation than the heart.

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grant
May 17 2003
11:23 am

I don’t have enough time right now to adequately respond to DvdSchp’s full course meal of a post, but I will say that part of what I like about DePalma’s response to film noir—and I must admit that I don’t know the academic definitions of all these film genres—is the introduction of “chance”. As I understand it, film noir is so exciting because it’s always a movie. Everything is so tight and purposeful. Just like the “femme fatale” herself. But, DePalma “allows” an unexpected character, the shiny necklace, to break up the entire logic of the movie. That’s what I loved about it. That was DePalma’s bomb in the ordered fabric of it all. And I did see the DVD commentaries and thought that was a main point DePalma was trying to make, that the audience must always be aware that they’re in a movie and enjoying a great dream, but the “chance” of waking life interrupts the self-controlled dream.