Femme Fatale (2002)

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Movie
German title Femme Fatale
Original title Femme Fatale
Brian de Palma - Femme Fatale.svg
Country of production France
original language English
Publishing year 2002
length 110 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Brian De Palma
script Brian De Palma
production Tarak Ben Ammar ,
Marina Gefter ,
Mark Lombardo ,
Chris Soldo
music Ryuichi Sakamoto
camera Thierry Arbogast
cut Bill Pankow
occupation

Femme Fatale is an erotic thriller by director Brian De Palma from 2002. The film, shot in Paris and Cannes, is based on the classic film noir . The main role of the femme fatale was taken on by Rebecca Romijn-Stamos , the male lead by Antonio Banderas .

action

During a film premiere on the occasion of the Cannes Film Festival , Laure Ash and a gang of jewel thieves stole a US $ 10 million diamond necklace from the star Veronica, which accompanies director Régis Wargnier and actress Sandrine Bonnaire . When the coup does not go as planned and ends in a bloodbath, Laure cheats on her accomplices and initially flees to Paris with the booty.

There she meets Lily, who looks very similar to her. When Lily commits suicide, Laure takes over her identity and continues her flight to the United States. On the flight there, she meets the ambassador Bruce Watts, whom she then marries.

Seven years later she returns to Paris, where her husband has taken over the US embassy. The Spanish photographer Nicolás Bardo is commissioned to take a photo of the media-shy Laure. When the photo is published, Laure knows that the bandits she betrayed will soon come on her trail. She fakes a kidnapping with Bardo as an unwanted ransom demander. When Bardo tries to uncover the deception while handing over the ransom, Laure first shoots her husband and then Bardo. Their former accomplices join them and throw them into the Seine .

Laure comes to underwater, wakes up and emerges from the bathtub in Lily's apartment. She had apparently only dreamed what had happened over the past seven years. This time she prevents Lily's suicide and sends her on a trip to America.

Seven years later, Laure meets her friend, the movie star. Due to the changes that have resulted from Lily's prevented suicide, the former partners die from the jewel robbery and not Laure's girlfriend, as Laure had seen in her dream before. Laure meets Nicolás Bardo and the two of them want to go for a drink.

background

As in many of his films, De Palma took over some motifs from Hitchcock's films: The doppelganger motif from Vertigo - From the Realm of the Dead and the theme of voyeurism from The Window to the Courtyard . The blonde femme fatale also alludes to Hitchcock's “use” of seductive but ice-cold blondes and, last but not least, to the classic of the genre, which is often directly cited: Woman without a Conscience ( Double Indemnity , 1944) with Barbara Stanwyck .

The composer Sakamoto wrote the soundtrack Bolerish , in which he quotes Maurice Ravel's role model.

The film took in an estimated budget of 35 million dollars, only 16.8 million US dollars worldwide at the box office one.

Staging

In Femme Fatale, De Palma uses a number of film aesthetic means that are typical of him. So he often uses the split screen and picture collages to represent thoughts and thoughts. Furthermore, De Palma stages the climax in both time levels of the film in slow motion. A technique that he already u. a. in Carrie and My Brother Cain .

In the dream sequence, which makes up a large part of the film, De Palma gives various indications that what is seen does not take place in the actual film reality. So he brings water to the foreground several times (an overflowing aquarium that does not overflow in the second shot, the true film reality; a glass that is in focus on the plane when pouring it), reminiscent of the overflowing bathtub in which Laura dreams.

Reviews

The film received mixed reviews when it was released. While some critics criticized the unpredictability of the plot as exaggerated, others saw it as a clever homage to Alfred Hitchcock . Roger Ebert praised De Palma's splendid style and craftsmanship, while Megan Turner of the New York Post was unimpressed: “De Palma is fooling around with split screens and slow motion, but all the cinematographic wealth of lists cannot hide the fact that This is just a bad movie. ”The Kansas City Star critic suggested that a middle-aged director wanted to surround himself with beautiful, half-naked women for work. In the Houston Community Newspapers , however, it was read that this "erotic thriller" was "neither particularly erotic nor a thrill". The German epd Film also saw the film by the aging De Palma as “... painted by someone who seems to be interested in nothing more than his own voyeurism, even if it is hardly more inspired than the presentation of a standard men's magazine. (...) And so, despite all the visual and narrative racket, femme fatale is nothing more than a curtsy in front of the altar of the holy whore.

Awards

Film editor Bill Pankow received the Seattle Film Critics' Prize for Best Editing in 2002 . The film was also in the category Best Film of the Film Festival of Catalonia in Sitges nominated.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Release certificate for Femme Fatale . Voluntary self-regulation of the film industry , February 2003 (PDF; test number: 93 042 K).
  2. ↑ Neue Musik Zeitung (NMZ 6/03)
  3. ↑ epd film No. 4/2003, joint work of Evangelical Journalism, Frankfurt a. M., pp. 55-56