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Rebecca Romijn, Antonio Banderas, Peter Coyote, Eriq Ebouaney, Edouard Montoute ... see more see more... , Rie Rasmussen , Thierry Fremont , Sandrine Bonnaire , Gregg Henry , Francoise Michaud , Philippe Guegan , Gilles Jacob , Régis Wargnier , Leonardo de la Fuente , Eva Darlan , Yves Marmion , Daniel Millgram , Fiona Curzon , Jean-Marie Frin , Valerie Maes , Jo Prestia , Alain Figlarz , David Belle , Dan Herzberg , Olivier Albou , Ugne Andrikonyte , Jaoquina Balaunde , Laurence Breheret , Emilie Chatel , Jean Chatel , Chloe Cremont , David Cuny , Bart De Palma , Henri Ernst , Eric Fesais , Olivier Follet , Marie Foulquie , Matthew Geczy , Serge Gonnin , Dorothee Grosjean , Faco Hanela , Denis Hecker , Salvatore Ingoglia , Pascale Jacquemot , Ada Marmion , Laurence Martin , Bertrand Merignac , Jean-Marc Mineo , Sam Olivier , Pascal Ondicolberry , Aurelie Pauker , Stephane Petit , Regis Quennesson , Justine Renard , Gerard Renault , Pascal Silvestre , Beata Sonczuk-Ben Ammar , Matilde Tancredi , Stephen Van Nietert , Stephen Van Nukerk , Driki Van Zyl , Rebecca Romijn-Stamos

Brian De Palma blends the emotional netherworld of film noir with a stylish portrayal of life among the wealthy and powerful in Paris in this glossy thriller. Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) is a be... read more read more...autiful but mysterious woman who has aligned herself with a small ring of jewel thieves, led by a man known as Black Tie (Eriq Ebouaney), who has planned a major score during the Cannes Film Festival. Sexy model Veronica (Rie Rasmussen) is scheduled to make a spectacular entrance for the screening of director Regis Wargnier's picture, wearing a body-hugging piece of jewelry worth a cool ten million dollars. Laure approaches the sexually adventurous Veronica and is able to seduce her, while at the same time stealing her diamond-studded outfit and replacing it with a carefully constructed counterfeit. Veronica, however, also makes off the loot without giving her partners their cut, and must go into hiding in order to avoid the wrath of Black Tie and his cohorts. Fate allows Laure to make her way to the United States, where in time she marries a powerful politician. Photographer Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas), however, had snapped a picture of Laure while she was on the lam years before, and when he takes an assignment to get a photo of the camera-shy woman, Laure realizes Nicolas is in a position to reveal her new identity to the world -- and put the bloodthirsty Black Tie back on her trail. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

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48% liked it

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48% liked it

134 critics

R, 1 hr. 50 min.

Directed by: Brian DePalma

Release Date: November 8, 2002

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DVD Release Date: March 25, 2003

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Flixster Reviews (681)

  • emilkakko
    December 2, 2011
    emilkakko
    Femme Fatale is pure style. Brian De Palma's long and outstanding career has always been full of stylish and sexy thrillers, but not many of them has had the same everlasting visual impact that Femme Fatale has.
    It is a film that pushes the boundaries of the filmmaking and stand... read mores as one of De Palma's best films. As De Palma himself has said, it is also his most subconscious film to date and i myself endorse that. Femme Fatale mixes film-noir into hallucinatory dream imagery that overflows with symbolism and many different layers beneath layers. It is a film so complex that one viewing will not show you even the half of what it holds in it's sleeve. And i mean that in best possible way.
    At it's core it is a story about a ice-cold con artist Laure Ash who in the middle of the huge diamond heist at Cannes double-crosses her partners in crime and gets in deep trouble for that.
    Once again we can see Palma's fantastic trademarks evident here. Femme Fatale is like a magic trick. It sneaks upon the viewer little by little and pulls us deeper into the dreamy and dangerous criminal underworld.
    Much has been said about the film's surreal tone and it's experimental visual approach, but in my opinion these elements are the main reason that makes this film such an joy to watch. Anyone familiar with Brian De Palma's earlier work will recognize his themes here and guess that there is more than meets the eye at play here.
    Femme Fatale's first twenty minutes is nothing short of filmmaking at it's stylishly best. Within those twenty minutes Brian De Palma constructs one of the most memorable openings to any film ever made. It also covers all of his classic trademarks we have used to see from him in a recent years.
    Brian De Palma like his American collagues Martin Scorsese, David Fincher and Michael Mann, is brilliant in masquerading his films into a Hollywood genre pieces and turning them into a something completely different. He clearly loves to demolish the viewers expectations and play with the material he is working with. He is one of those rare artists whose films are same time as entertaining as they are artistically challenging. Actually his work in my opinion reminds very much to Spanish master Pedro Almodovar's. They both share much in common in style and themes.
    Brian De Palma might be one of the world's most underrated directors working today and he certainly deserves more attention as a filmmaker.
    With it's sleek surface and hypnotic mood Femme Fatale pulls you in and never let viewer off it's hook. It is a film that gets richer by each viewing.
    From the technical side must mention Thierry Arbogast's wonderful photography and Ryuichi Sakamoto's hypnotic and beautiful score which both add something truly unique into this film's atmosphere.
    This is a film that has so many clever details, so many themes and so many great things in it that it simply needs to be seen over and over again.
    Femme Fatale might not stand a closer look with it's occasionally silly story, but it is damn nice to look at.
  • ythelastman89
    March 30, 2010
    ythelastman89
    It really feels like a lot of Brian De Palma’s early work, playing around with the Noir genre and fitting it into a modern caper/thriller. The visual style is beautiful, even more than usual due to the fact that it’s filmed in breathtaking areas in Cannes. The story is extrem... read moreely fun and keeps you guessing along the way. The acting is decent, Rebecca Romijn clearly wasn’t that experienced at the time, but more of her work is visual anyway. I’m also not a huge fan of Antonio Banderas, but he was actually very good in this. While it’s not a perfect movie, it’s definitely worthwhile and a return to the past for De Palma.
  • ScoopOnline
    December 2, 2009
    ScoopOnline
    Outstanding! The opening stole my attention already.
  • Deano78
    June 2, 2009
    Deano78
    A pretty decent sultry thriller directed by Brian DePalma. A jewel thief tries to cover her past but a chance photo of her alerts the people she has crossed before. Enjoyable if not quite a classic but I do like the ending and Rebecca Romijn suits the role to a T before her succe... read moress as Mystique in the X-Men series.
  • clintervin
    March 19, 2009
    clintervin
    I loved it! Rebecca is fantastic, breathtakingly beautiful and a fine actress too. Antonio Bandaras is great, although his comedic lines are too goofy. This is a story about all manner of trickery, typical of DePalma. His story line is as convoluted as ever (Snake Eyes, Body Doub... read morele), but his fans expect this. In the disk's Special Features, I enjoyed the director's commentary. This delivers the sizzle, if not the substance.
  • matertenebraum
    August 17, 2008
    matertenebraum
    "Femme Fatale" is best understood as a game played by Brian De Palma and appreciated by knowing cineastes. It's not about story or characters, but about the construction and manipulation of art.

    Antonio Banderas plays Nicolas Bardo, a photographer who has turned his back on ph... read moreotographing celebrities. He now spends his time living in an apartment, making huge composite images by arranging tiny photographs. The Bardo character, in many ways, is Brian De Palma. At war with Hollywood storytelling (which is fuelled by celebrity) De Palma takes these multiple images and weaves them into a tapestry until a final image is made. The point is that the final image is not reality. It is the artists recreation and completely false.

    At the end of the film, Bardo completes his masterpiece by inserting a little white figure (of Laura) onto his wall. The figure doesn't belong there, Bardo simply chooses to put it there. Thematically, "Femme Fatale" ends on the same note. Noir fatalism is thwarted by a completely arbitrary, totally ILLOGICAL and cosmically IMPOSSIBLE moment of editing whereby De Palma redeems his hero and kills off her opponents.

    Critics call this sequence implausible. But De Palma's point is that it doesn't have to be plausible. Bardo puts the white figure on his wall because he wants to. Similarly, De Palma ends the film as he does, because he wants to. He shows us Laura's depressing noir dream and then rescues her from it. He makes it clear that he is redeeming her and willing this positive ending into existence solely because he as an artist (noir God), has the power to do so.

    This flips the usual noir logic. If Kubrick's "The Killing" highlights the deterministic law of the universe (Clay's plan crumbling to pieces all because of a random poodle), De Palma's "Femme Fatale" highlights the power of the artist, able to do recreate a universe entirely devoid of cosmic law.

    This theme is also highlighted by the use of the name "Bardo", a Tibetan word meaning "intermediate state". A state between life and death. Over the course of the film, Bardo will be caught between life and death, as De Palma toys with killing him. Bardo's existence or artistic merit is down to an artist's mere whim.

    Everything else about De Palma is present in Femme Fatale: the voyeur and his object, the representation inside the representation, the original and its fake copy, the doubled characters, key episodes built from multiple points of views, the elaborate camera work.

    Watch as De Palma's camera continuously misleads our eyes, giving the hidden predominance over the shown, until we are forced to separate in our minds the real from its representation and to connect the different pieces into a "sense".

    This technique comprises the film watching experience as a whole, and is what De Palma's films are essentially about, from Jack Terry's reconstruction of a truth with the aid of montage in "Blow Out", to Santoro's investigations of a crime from partial testimonies in "Snake Eyes".

    This theme, the division between reality and image, has grown increasingly important for De Palma. His last five movies ("Redacted", "Dahlia", "Mission Impossible", "Snake Eyes," and "Mission to Mars,") were all concerned with how we see and watch movies. He is obsessed with reminding us that information is not the same thing as knowledge.

    "Snake Eyes" opened with an unbroken tracking shot that laid out the plot. The rest of the movie was a demonstration of why everything we had seen in that sequence was a lie. The opening sequence of "Mission: Impossible" showed us Tom Cruise's crew of agents being picked off one by one. We had already seen each of those murders, though, in nearly subliminal blips during the movie's credit sequence (information without knowledge). "Black Dahlia" and "Redacted" similarly deal with a search for truth amongst an image bank of lies.

    "Femme Fatale" begins with a long heist sequence. Throughout this sequence, allusions are made to "Snake Eyes" (eg- the literal "serpent camera" and the object of the heist, a snake shaped piece of gold), De Palma effectively saying: "I'm lying to you. The camera is a snake and not to be trusted." Note the film "Est - Ouest" showing as the heist goes on. Another stream-of-consciousness film with an unreliable narrator.

    The rest of "Femme Fatale" takes a "dream within a film" approach, (foreshadowed in opening shot). De Palma sets the dream sequence up with careful details: the storm, the clock (Time: 3:33), the water running, Laura sinking. Signs that would eventually emerge all the way through, emphasising the surreal atmosphere of Laura's adventure.

    From here on, logic will be put aside as De Palma's mise-en-scene develops into pure form. Everything is disconnected, dialogue makes no sense (at some points it's dubbed without even following the actors' lips), time jumps back and forth etc.

    During the dream, Laura will embody different female archetypes, all traceable in film history and particularly in De Palma's films. She's Kim Novak in "Vertigo" and also Melanie Griffith's prostitute of "Body Double" and so on and so on.

    The majority of De Palma's films have dream sequences. Even a "serious" film like 'Casualties of War' ends with a character waking up on a train, realising that the whole film was a nightmare. Why does De Palma feel the need to insert this? My guess is that he doesn't want his films to be seen as "real". They exist in a wholly metaphysical space.

    As usual with a De Palma film, critics and audiences rejected Femme Fatale. But this is a brilliant film, it's only flaw being an unimaginatively shot (by De Palma standards) heist sequence.
  • harrycaul
    January 24, 2008
    harrycaul
    This is, without doubt, one of Brian De Palma's greatest achievements, an incredibly rich and playful movie which immeasurably rewards repeated viewings. Basically, you get out of it what you put in. If you've got your wits about you, an open mind and a keen pair of eyes, you're ... read morein for a treat. Beneath its ludicrous exterior there lurks as intelligent a film as you could wish to see, a film which, refreshingly, credits its audience with the ability to understand it without spoon-feeding. If you've been paying close enough attention, the controversial late twist triumphantly validates innumerable carefully laid glimpses of the truth; you ought to feel exhilarated rather than cheated, eager to hit the rewind button in search of further clues. In De Palma's enchanted world: fish-tanks mimic overflowing baths, advertising posters offer vital pointers, casually seen faces become woven into the story and time stands still. As a Parallel Universe thriller, it's smarter, wittier, more inventive and more skilfully told than "Run, Lola, Run" et al. Ironically, this masterpiece sank without a trace in the UK and is hard to locate on DVD.
  • puffchunk
    October 25, 2007
    puffchunk
    What a piece of crap.
  • pier007
    July 9, 2007
    pier007
    Another intricated cinephile masturbation by DePalma, though his virtuous and stylish mise-en-scene is always present. fun and sexy, especially for the soundtrack and Rebecca Romijn's presence.
  • kenstachnik
    July 2, 2007
    kenstachnik
    One of the coolest openings ever...Hot Lesbian Cannes Heist action...

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Critic Reviews

Jonathan Rosenbaum
November 15, 2002
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

I found myself capitulating to its inspired formalist madness -- something I've resisted in [De Palma's] films for the past 30-odd years. Full Review

Richard Roeper
November 11, 2002
Richard Roeper, Ebert & Roeper

A wonderful ride. Full Review

David Edelstein
November 9, 2002
David Edelstein, Slate

De Palma has provided enough ripe flesh, split-screen mayhem, and dreamlike imagery to power six films noir. Full Review

Desson Thomson
November 8, 2002
Desson Thomson, Washington Post

No normal person should hurt himself trying to follow the thing.

Ty Burr
November 8, 2002
Ty Burr, Boston Globe

Great over-the-top moviemaking if you're in a slap-happy mood. Full Review

Bill Muller
November 8, 2002
Bill Muller, Arizona Republic

At least Femme Fatale has an apt title - "femme" because it's about a woman and "fatale" because it makes you want to jump out a window.

Michael Wilmington
November 7, 2002
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune

A feast for hard-core movie or De Palma buffs (and Romijn-Stamos junkies) but a famine for anyone looking for a good story. Full Review

Stephen Hunter
November 6, 2002
Stephen Hunter, Washington Post

Pretty amusing when the director apes Hitchcock, and pretty awful when he apes himself. Full Review

Claudia Puig
November 6, 2002
Claudia Puig, USA Today

More tawdry than titillating, what should have been sultry is more often skanky. Full Review

Edward Guthmann
November 6, 2002
Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle

Sexy and passably entertaining, with a plot that's too clever by half. Full Review

Critic ratings and reviews powered by RottenTomatoes.com

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Femme Fatale Trivia

  • In The Black Dahlia, who played the enigmatic 'femme fatale', Madeleine Linscot?  Answer »
  • Who play as the bad girl in femme fatale?  Answer »
  • Who plays Mystique in X-men series? she was also in Femme Fatale, The Alibi, and Godsend.  Answer »
  • Name the actress who plays Meredith Johnson, the Femme Fatale, who causes much trouble for Michael Douglas in Disclosure (1994)?  Answer »
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