the millennium kids

“Formalism and an absence of humanism don’t necessarily entail a lack of artistic seriousness. Indeed, looking for symmetry and coherence in a universe that seems to consist only of chaotic fragments from other movies—a very contemporary and very real dilemma—might constitute a genuine quest for transcendence.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum on Femme Fatale

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Approaching this film as a thriller would be a classic mistake (I should know, I made it). It opens with a heist-gone-wrong and a girl-on-the-run set-up, but only occasionally do these devices constitute what could be called a storyline. Well, maybe a story, but certainly not a ‘line’—it takes longer than usual to pick up the film’s gambit, but the only thing linear about Femme Fatale is De Palma’s visual rhythms, which, as always, unfold with awesome aplomb. After enough reveals, De Palma’s chess moves seem arbitrary; after a few more, you realize he’s not interested in the suspension of disbelief, but in the indulgence of it. With De Palma as conductor, Femme Fatale coalesces into a master filmmaker’s hallucinatory daydream—why care about the thrills of luck when there are the perplexities of fate? De Palma’s belief in cause and effect goes beyond a technician’s fetish for genre mechanics and into a deeper causality that asserts itself in the interstices of our personal mysteries. In the absence of what could be called a younger De Palma’s diagrammatic realism, Femme Fatale’s passion makes great art, which, as Godard said, like fire, is born from what it burns.