Tuesday's Overlooked Movie: Femme Fatale (2002)

Femme Fatale is one of the latest efforts by Brian De Palma, whose films I've generally liked, with some exceptions. This wasn't one of those exceptions.

Femme Fatale was made in France, possibly because De Palma couldn't raise the money in the USA. There's certain Europeanness in the film, so I'm not sure if it suits the American taste. There's something that reminds me of a Luc Besson or a Jan Kounen in this.

The film is full of technical trickstery and magistery that's characteristic of De Palma: camera drives, odd angles, long shots, shots through different filters, all that. The plot - what I could make of it - was suited to the feverish camera work. Femme fatale of the title is a career criminal, sexy as hell (played by Rebecca Rominj, who looks a bit too much the early 2000's, but I don't mind), who's on the loose from her fellow gangsters. The plot is full of twists one just can't see coming - and the last one is actually pretty absurd, but I think it fits the general mood of the film. There's some thematics on voyeurism that's also characteristic of De Palma, but I'm not sure what De Palma wants to say with the film. People - especially women - are being watched and this watching becomes more mechanistic via surveillance cameras and such, but then what? Women can also take advantage of them being watched, but it's unclear what kind of nature De Palma is saying this vantage point could be. This kind of uncertainty of thematics is also characteristic of De Palma.

More Overlooked Films at Todd Mason's blog here. (For once I managed to do this in time!)

The Mirror and Black Dahlia

Couple nights ago I saw Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror (1975) maybe for the seventh time. I've been lucky enough to have seen it more often on a screen than on a television, even though it makes quite a punch even on a tube. What's the most surprising thing about Tarkovsky's film (which is to me his best) is that it makes a different impression every time. It's a very beautiful film, but now I thought it was a horror film, the horror coming out from the past that is always out there, haunting us, cursing us. (And there are also some conventional horror elements, such as an apparition, a ghost woman whose real identity is never explained).

The Mirror is also best seen many times. Some films you grasp at one viewing and you can live all your life without even thinking about seeing them again. The Mirror just won't leave you alone. There's always something you haven't noticed before. And the story arc (if I may use the word in this context) is a very difficult one, but now, after seven viewings I think I could say I understand what happens in the movie.

I also understood now why the ending is so powerful, even though there's nothing much happening: an old woman, possibly a grandmother, is escorting two little kids across the field and at times we see a young woman, a mother of the kids, thinking about something with a wishful smile on her face. The scenes with a woman are set in a different time, before the kids are born. (Or then it's after the war, but the woman seems to be too young for that.) There's a crucial scene somewhere in the film after which we see everything absolved. The sins, the past, every crime, every misdeed, have been forgiven and all we have is the future and the love. That's why the ending is so powerful: the granny who takes care of the children is the embodiment of the future and love.

I just have to detect the crucial scene. I think it's the scene near the end in which Tarkovsky's alter ego releases a bird from his hands.

(And a bit in Finnish: en ole ikinä huomannut kenenkään mainitsevan sitä, että yhdessä kohtauksessa nähdään suomalaisia kirjoja kirjahyllyssä. Mustavalkoisessa takautumassa, jossa Tarkovskin alter ego ja tämän ex-vaimo, Margarita Teherova, keskustelevat Ignat-pojan hoidosta, nähdään lyhyen aikaa pieni pätkä, kun Teherova seisoo pää vinossa kirjahyllyn edessä. Hyllyssä ovat vierekkäin Dalton Trumbon Sotilaspoika ja 60-luvun alussa julkaistu Tsehovin kaksiosainen Suuret kertomukset! Näiden lisäksi hyllyssä näyttää olevan kaksi venäjänkielistä kirjaa. Tarkistakaapa heti, kun teille tulee mahdollisuus!)

And then something completely different: I saw Brian De Palman's The Black Dahlia recently. It's been receiving lots of negative reviews, and I was as perplexed as those anonymous and pseudonymous commentators at IMDb. It seems that the film's got only one person to understand it: Tapani Maskula, of the Turun Sanomat magazine, his review is here. (It's understandably in Finnish, but he gave it three stars out of five.) He likens the film to Hawks's The Big Sleep from 1946 and says that the film must've seemed as baffling as De Palma's more recent effort. He promises, therefore, that De Palma's The Black Dahlia could still rise to the status of a classic.

I found the film intriguing. It kept me baffled and I was utterly disappointed at some decisions. The most baffling thing about the film was that there didn't seemed to be enough scenes, i.e. there was always something missing. Lots and lots of stuff got away unexplained, some of them crucial to the plot and psychology of the characters. This makes the film seem more clumsy than it really is. Maybe I should seek this out in, say, 2015 and take a fresh look.

This is the case with many of De Palma's films. There seems to be something missing, especially in his Hitchcockian suspense films, like Body Double (1984). The same goes for some of his later big-budget efforts like Snake Eyes (which is visually great) and Mission To Mars (even though I really liked the first part of the film). Even some of his most mainstream work is baffling at some level. Take, for example, a look at The Untouchables: you never get to know what's really behind all the broughaha and especially what makes Eliot Ness and his men tick. There's great vitality to the film, but that's all there is. There's nothing in De Palma's films to love, you can get interested in them and their themes, and you can admire them for De Palma's techniques, but that's all there is.

It may be of help to notice that De Palma makes more mistakes when he's doing film from other people's screenplays. The Black Dahlia was written by Josh Friedman, Mission To Mars was written by a lot of different folks, Snake Eyes by David Koepp, The Bonfire of the Vanities by Michael Cristofer, The Untouchables by David Mamet, etc. etc. His most satisfying films seem to be those he wrote himself (Carrie, Raising Cain, Blow Out, his early suspense thrillers).

The same goes for, by the way, William Friedkin. There's always the same sense of unfulfillment in his films, as if he really didn't know what his themes are. Take a look at Cruising. You never know what's happening there, and you don't think anyone else knew, for that matter. His most fluent films are those without any special resonance: The Exorcist, Wages of Fear.

PS. Lots of work done lately and the same will continue for a month or two, so necessarily there's not much blogging in the near future.

Brian De Palma: Blow Out

I saw Brian De Palma's Blow Out Monday evening and liked it very much. It was at least fifteen years when I saw it for the last time (at least I don't remember seeing it) and didn't remember much of it. It's a tour de force in a technical sense, but it's also an exploding critique of masculinity. It's obvious that John Travolta doesn't really love Nancy Allen, he only sees a possibility to gain back his lost manhood and pride. He uses her and gets quite a punishment.

I wondered, though, why so many people laughed at the climax, when Travolta rushed to save Allen. De Palma uses slow motion, as he often does in climaxes, and I didn't see anything funny about that. Maybe it was Travolta. Well, they could've left out the falling snow from the scene in which Travolta listens to the tape he recorded while Allen was being strangled... The final scene is crushing and very ironic. No one laughed, even though there's also jokey feel to the scene.

Which goes to prove that De Palma is a master of irony.

Even though he's rather underappreciated at the moment. I wonder why. Someone might say that his career is uneven. Hey, whose isn't? I think that even in his worst films there's something interesting, even in Bonfire of the Vanities (I wrote a positive review of it when I hadn't yet heard that it was a box-office and critical failure everywhere else; haven't seen it since, so can't really say). The Mars film has some spectacular scenes and the opening shot of Snake Eyes is breath-taking. Along with Blow Out, my personal favourite would be Raising Cain, with very good overacting from John Lithgow. (I wrote somewhere that Lithgow is a better psycopath than Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs, based on the De Palma film and Ricochet by Russell Mulcahy. Should see that again to verify. Maybe I wasn't thinking clearly.)