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Synopsis: Jewel thief Laure Ash and her gang of henchmen stage a daring theft at the Cannes film festival. The theft goes awry, with Laure double crossing her fellow criminals. She flees the scene of the crime and attempts to lose herself where her cohorts can't find her, while finding a way to fence the stolen jewels. Through an improbable sequence of events, she is mistaken for another woman, whose passport she uses to flee France. On the plane to America, she meets a millionaire. Seven years later, Laure returns to France as the wife of the new American ambassador. She is recognized by a papparazi, who photographs her and puts her face on the cover of the tabloids. She ensnares the hapless photographer in an intricate kidnapping scam, but unfortunately, she's been recognized by her former partners, who want a piece of her....

Fun and Games: I’ve never really liked Brian De Palma’s comedies. Films like Get to Know Your Rabbit/, Home Movies, and Wise Guys demonstrate to me that De Palma doesn’t have the feel or rhythm for broad farce. But that’s not to say that I don’t find some of his films to be hysterically funny. There are a couple of passages in The Fury, for instance, that had me rolling, and The Phantom of the Paradise is one long, merciless put-on. De Palma has had a rough career patch of late, with the relative failures of Snake Eyes (which I haven’t seen) and Mission to Mars (which, unfortunately, I HAVE seen), so as he has done so many times before, he has returned to first principles. For De Palma, first principles is the noir-ish thriller. Imagine my surprise when I found that his new film, Femme Fatale, is also the funniest film he has ever made. I’m going to speak a little bit of heresy here: even though De Palma is, perhaps, the most derivative of all major filmmakers, like the great pop artists, he has made his borrowings from others uniquely his own. NO ONE makes films that look like De Palma’s films, with their offhanded grace and cruel elegance. No one has ever made slick, commercial films that are as sinuous and as seductive. As a craftsman, De Palma puts a high gloss burnishing onto his projects. Even at their worst, his films are fun to watch. This one is one of his best, snaking through a twisty turny film noir freakout with nary a hair out of place.

There is practically no substance to this film. The performances are merely adequate (since there is so little dialogue, there is barely any opportunity for whatever limited skills Rebecca Romijn-Stamos or any of her co-stars bring to the project to wreck it). The plotline is idiotic when reduced to literal events (much as the plotlines of most films noir are idiotic). But who cares? The film is a joy to watch. The leads are eye candy of the highest order, but the real star of the film is De Palma's camera, as it moves through Cannes picking up hilarious details that clue the viewer in to the put-on. My own favorite of these is a poster featuring Millais's painting of a drowned Ophelia in which the pre-Raphaelite face of the original has been replaced with Rebecca Romijn-Stamos's face, but I love how she begins the film taking tips from Barbrara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and I LOVE the fact that the film is overtly sexual. Blake Edwards once had a character describe Ravel's "Bolero" as the perfect music for fucking ever written, and that's how De Palma uses it here (particularly over the lesbian seductiion at the film's outset). The music itself is a perfect metaphor for the film at large: it repeats itself in ever insinuating circles, adding layers of meaning as it meanders through its progressions back upon itself. The big surprise of the film, though, is that De Palma has subverted his own cinematic anima and reputation for outrageous misogyny to create a humane uplift at the end of the film. Who would have guessed it?

Every shot in Femme Fatale is part of a setpiece, and since the film is all setpieces, it’s all of a piece. In a world of popcorn films, this one is a bar of rich, dark chocolate. It’s not anymore nutritious than popcorn, but it IS more sinfully delightful..