Two and a half years ago, when I saw Alain Corneau’s Crime d’amour,
I enjoyed the performances of Kristin Scott-Thomas and Ludivine
Sagnier, but remember thinking the directing was flat and that what this
sub-Hitchcockian scenario really needed was a flashier, more
Expressionist mise en scène to make it pop. Events have now conspired to make me think perhaps there is a God after all, because here comes Passion, an English language remake of Corneau’s psychothriller directed by Mr Flashy Sub-Hitchcock himself – Brian de Palma.
Forget the disappointing Black Dahlia, derailed and diluted by catastrophic casting of just about everyone except Aaron Eckhart, or the Faux Found Footage of Redacted. Passion is a welcome return to the elements of Continental Brian, previously laid out for our delectation in the underrated Femme Fatale.
Beautiful women in lingerie? Tick. Preposterous rococo plot which
collapses after about, oh, five seconds’ analysis? Tick. Lipstick and
nail varnish? Fuck-me (and-break-my-ankle) shoes in scarlet crocodile or
emerald suede? Crazy camera angles, baroque lighting effects, bonkers
split screen? Dream sequences so indistinguishable from the dreamlike
ambience of the film itself that you can’t tell where they stop or
start? De Palma pastiching himself pastiching Hitchcock? Tick, tick, tick.
Ladies and gentlemen, in the Blonde Corner we have Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls
Regina-to-the-max-mode as Christine, unscrupulous dragon lady boss of a
super-slick advertising agency in Berlin. She wears the Big Trousers,
literally. Facing off against her in the Brunette corner we have
black-suited Noomi Rapace as Isabelle, the talented protégée for whose
idea Christine takes credit, leading to an escalating war of boardroom
attrition involving shared boyfriends, betrayal, public humiliation and
eventually, yup, murder. Also,
girl-on-girl kissing, gratuitous black
stockings, sexy smoking and great earrings.
But wait, there’s more! Evidently Corneau’s Blonde versus Brunette
scenario wasn’t enough for De Palma, for the naughty old poodle has
added a Redhead – German actress Karoline Herfurth, who played the
Lisbeth Salander-like tyro vampire in the splendid Wir sind die nacht (We Are the Night). She holds
her own against the film’s two heavy hitters as Dani, Isabelle’s
assistant, who turns the film’s unromantic triangle into an uneven
square. It’s only the fourth angle – a shared boyfriend called Dirk –
who lets the side down; Paul Anderson was enigmatic and intriguing as
Colonel Sebastian Moran in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, but
he’s miscast here, not to mention sloppily directed, and it’s hard to
see what either Christine or Isabelle sees in him. But then, one gets
the impression De Palma wasn’t terribly interested in the male
characters. It’s the girl stuff that interests him. And why not?
It’s a film of surfaces and reflections, played out against a backdrop of glassy modern architecture and Pino Donaggio’s music, which at times echoes not just his own score for Dressed to Kill but Ennio Morricone’s for The Thing. There is no redeeming moral element, no insight into the human condition, no social comment, no resonance beyond that of a half-remembered dream, no nourishment for the soul. Unless, of course, your soul gets off, as mine does, on quintessentially De Palma-esque games of doubling, on the best accessorised exercise in backstabbing bitchery since Olivier Assayas’s DemonLover, on the best nervous breakdown in a swanky motor since Lana Turner had a hysterical screaming fit at the wheel of her car in The Bad and the Beautiful, on Bette Davis versus Joan Crawford-style melodramatic point-scoring, on the look of things, on camera moves, on film itself.
sara.m
Post a Comment