NYFF 2012: "Passion"

Rachel McAdams going about as far as she's going to for her director.

My initial attempted aperçu about this romp was: "Passion purports to be a Brian De Palma remake of Love Crime but is in fact a Radley Metzger remake of demonlover." As we all know Twitter isn't so great with nuance and while the above is thereby wracked with small but not entirely insignificant innaccuracies I'll still stand by it. In any event Passion is, by De Palma standards, as compellingly watchable as his 2007 Redacted was aesthetically and by extension morally confounding. The problems with Redacted were many, but the main—formal—one casts a useful light on what helps makes Passion work. That is, the various visual platforms from which De Palma told Redacted's story were so haphazardly contrived/executed as to very nearly scotch De Palma's rep as a visual "master." The "surveillance video" didn't look like surveillance video, the computer screen chats didn't look like computer screen chats, etc. "Brechtian" or not, this created the wrong kind of alienation effect. Someone or something must have made DePalma understand this since that time, because Passion shows he's done some homework. While I daresay a very sharp dissector could point out ways in which total accuracy eludes him, the phone-camera advertising spot and hotel sex file look convincingly and compellingly authentic, as does all the multi-screen Skypeing in the picture, and more. That these screens all appear in frames put on real celluloid film by longtime Almodóvar cinematographer José Luis Alcaine. Long a top player in the realm of split-screen and multi-bifurcated compositions, De Palma really makes his frames within frames within frames work for him here. 

And this, some will intuit, is in the service of saying something about The Way We Live Now. In a way the real world has caught up with a vision that De Palma has always been putting forward, one that he and his fellow movie brats intuited from Michael Powell's Peeping Tom perhaps: that we are always looking, and we are always looking not at what is, or more to the point, ought to be, in front of us, but at something we're putting in front of us, some screen containing some contrivance of what we would like to think is our desire. This vision has become, for DePalma, so distilled (some would say rarified) that his best work of the past twenty years or maybe even more (hey, I really LIKE Femme Fatale!) has almost everything to do with that idea and nothing to do with the way actual human beings behave or speak. So the ridiculously flat dialogue and almost pantomime performance styles on display in Passion will not come as any surprise to a longtime De Palma watcher, although they are likely to elicit some sort of "That was stupid" reflex in non-adepts. No matter—does this thing even have a U.S. distributor yet? In any event, in adapting the tonally straightforward but full-of-myriad-plot-twists 2010 Alain Corneau thriller Love Crime (a far more conventional picture than his still brain-melting 1979 Serie Noire, the seediest of Jim Thompson adaptations, and that's really saying something), De Palma insists of course on reconfiguring it into a movie about the duplicity of cinematic subjectivity and then cranking the volume of that subjectivity up to eleven once a strong prescription sleep aid enters the scenario of ruthless corporate one-upswomanship. 

it's a hoot, all right, but it isn't quite Radley Metzger, which is to say in a sense that it isn't quite Brian De Palma either. It doesn't have enough sex, is the thing. At 72 hardly an enfant terrible any longer, De Palma is nonetheless palpably constrained. American female stars of the bankability caliber necessary to obtain foreign funding (if I read my credits correctly there's not one American dollar in this movie, so to speak) simply won't do the kind of things De Palma leading ladies of the '80s had little if any trouble with. Hence, the ostensible sapphic tensions between the characters played by Rachel McAdams (American Canadian [see comments], appears in her underwear) and Noomi Rapace (European, appears topless) don't really get all that much traction and the most explicit stuff here is in the reveal of sex toys. Being an old master doesn't cut certain kinds of ice these days, I guess. I almost feel sorry for the guy. 

Comments

[Benjamin]

McAdams (Canadian).

Not that this piece of trivia blows a hole in your thesis, as I haven't found much of her American film work to be as brave or as actorly as her television work in the enjoyable Slings & Arrows. One of the enjoyable aspects of Notting Hill is the meta-tension that comes from watching an actress play an actress in modest dishabille talk about nudity clauses. But it is also a scene that, I baselessly assume, accurately portrayed and spotlighted the sort of unsexy business wrangling that goes into modern onscreen sex. And McAdams has enough profile these days to be very much legally wrangled and handled by Hollywood lawyers, which mades her onscreen displays American, at least by proxy.

[James Keepnews]

And here I thought demonlover was "Boo" Radley Metzger's re-make/mash-up of World on a Wire and The Third Generation, or at least the scenes that take place in offices. The things I learn on this blog...up to and including your evidently unshared OCD where Canadian acresses are concerned. La McAdams is but the latest in a long line of beguiling, ferociously talented hotties are concerned, a line within my lifetime that includes La Bujold, La Bussières, La Kirshner, La Parker, La Polley, La Paquin, La frickin' &c....

[Glenn Kenny]

Benjamin, thanks for the dispensation. But still: DAMN!!!!!

[Petey]

"hey, I really LIKE Femme Fatale!"

AS WELL YOU SHOULD! It's seriously in the running as his best movie, believe it or not. Amazing stuff. Without question his best post-Scarface outing.

He's obviously been frustratingly inconsistent of late, with nothing REALLY good other than Femme Fatale since the early '90's. (Though even his bad movies are still worth a viewing. Mission to Mars ain't very good, but that weightless dance sequence is still worth the price of admission.)

But I"m pretty amped for Passion. McAdams is superb at the moment, and I've got hopes he can do something up to his better work here.

[Petey]

"It doesn't have enough sex, is the thing. At 72 hardly an enfant terrible any longer, De Palma is nonetheless palpably constrained. [Canadian] female stars of the bankability caliber necessary to obtain foreign funding (if I read my credits correctly there's not one American dollar in this movie, so to speak) simply won't do the kind of thngs De Palma leading ladies of the '80s had little if any trouble with."

I obviously seen Passion, so maybe it just doesn't work. But it is worth noting that Femme Fatale actually didn't have much sex - Romijn never took off her clothes - yet it was a helluva sexy movie.

There are more ways to skin that particular cat than Radley Metzger's methods, or even '80's De Palma's methods. But, again, I haven't seen Passion.

[Scott]

I caught "Passion" in Toronto, and McAdams and De Palma did a Q&A afterward, in which the actress was asked whether she had any reservations about taking on such a racy part. And she replied that she thought it was actually pretty restrained. I also saw Terrence Malick's "To the Wonder", in which McAdams appears as well, and she does have a brief nude scene in that film. So I'm not sure if the case here is necessarily of an A-list actress's prudishness. I agree with Glenn that "Passion" seemed more tame and chaste than the material called for, but maybe that was De Palma's conception of it. If I recall, the original French film it was based on didn't have much on-screen sex or nudity either.

[Peter Nellhaus]

There's always the original film version of "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo". Noomi Rapace, sapphic, no tension, but lots of traction.

[lipranzer]

I guess I have to out myself and say I thought REDACTED was kind of okay, or at least I didn't hate it. I agree the acting was amateurish at best, as well as the dialogue. And I'll concede if I watch it again maybe the "surveillance video" and "computer screen chats" and so on didn't look authentic, but they didn't bug me when I saw it in theaters. What I liked about the movie was (1) yes, the Brechtian device of questioning the very nature of how the war was being covered, and (2) and this is the crucial one; unlike every other film dealing with the Iraq War that came out around that time, it didn't chicken out by backing away from the subject it was trying to raise. Also, the film was unfavorably compared to CASUALTIES OF WAR, and while that film was indeed better (like DRESSED TO KILL, this was a De Palma film I didn't like on first glance - in point of fact, I hated it - but improved for me on second viewing), at least REDACTED didn't have the "maybe-it-was-all-just-a-bad-dream" ending of CASUALTIES that damaged that movie for me.

Oh, and I'm afraid I can't join the FEMME FATALE love; the first 15 minutes are brilliant, and all the plot twists were well done, but I wish somebody else besides Rebecca Romijn and Antonio Banderas had played the lead roles, as I found them one-note and annoying (I've come to the unfortunate conclusion as beautiful as Romijn is, I haven't liked her in anything outside of the X-Men movies).

One thing I am curious about in regards to PASSION; I liked LOVE CRIME, but without giving anything away, I thought the second half of the movie took too long to get to the payoff, though I will admit the payoff was worth it. Is that true with De Palma's film?

[Graig]

Oh man, you know what Criterion should do? Put out a disc of SERIE NOIR. I saw it at a LACMA retrospective of french crime films and, wow, that is one slobbering beast of a film. And not available on Region 1 DVD, to my knowledge. I saw LOVE CRIME and thought it was ok, probably better in conception than delivery, and would have benefited from a more compelling lead actress at the center. "Bring on the DePalma remake," I tweeted at the time. So I'm looking forward to this.

[Chris O.]

Something about De Palma's films the last sixteen years that have more of a crisp antiseptic look to them unlike anyone else's -- don't know if it's technology, costume, lighting, production design or all of the above -- to kind of further underscore his "terror beneath the surface" themes.

Man, McAdams is looking rather "Marnie"-era Hedren-istic in that shot, too, speaking of De Palma's wont.

[colinr]

Redacted was one of the best films of the 2000s. Its not about being faithful to YouTube or security cameras etc, but about what Mr Kenny is talking about in this post - the mediation through screens and the way that an experience watched through a screen, even of 'real' events or 'real' conversations allows a kind of safe distancing from contemplation of the horror or importance of a situation. It's bringing people together whilst simultaneously removing them from being able to do anything about what they witness or get involved in, whether terrorist attacks or simply talking to family members overseas.

Yet the real horror comes from the face to face contact with other people which is still responsible for all the physical brutality that occurs in the world. The physical world still has the major impact, even if it gets used as grist to the mill of the electronic one.

And the most devastating moment is the (rather conventional)at the very end of the soldier returning home, sat with his family for a welcome home meal. They are physically reunited but he is now forever apart from them following what he has witnessed, and they will be forever apart from him because they have no idea (or no interest beyond the superficial) in what he experienced whilst 'over there'.

That film really gets at the idea that it is not purely the electronic world that distances or connects people in wonky ways. Distanciation, trauma and lack of communication/empathy occurs in real life too. It's just a new medium being used for the age old human problems.

[colinr]

And those brutally 'redacted' photographs at the end bear comparison with those bluntly accusatory ones at the end of von Trier's Dogville and Manderlay.