Passion

 As his penultimate film, Brian De Palma's Passion (2012) is valedictory, a farewell, it seems, to the exorbitant baroque thrillers and horror films on which the director built his reputation. It would be nice to claim that the movie is some kind of masterpiece, but, in fact, it's interesting primarily as the distillation of themes that the director has explored in other better movies.  In this context, the term "themes" is too literary and suggests that there is a sensibility at work in De Palma's best pictures that that operates on the basis of ideas.  A "theme" as used in this note doesn't mean a subject or concept that is developed as an idea -- rather, the term "theme" here invokes music:  De Palma's themes are atmospheric, pictorial, tics involving color and motion and choreographed camera movements, analytical vertical shots derived from Hitchcock, Steadi-cam tracking shots gliding up and down stairs or spinning vertiginously around characters, crane shots slipping and sliding over the heads of the actors, elaborate split-screen imagery conveying simultaneity of two or three actions at once, enormous brooding close-ups of eyes and mouth, and disconcerting point-of-view imagery This lush and voluptuous way of staging scenes is combined with lurid, feverish sex and violence.  Furthermore, nothing is really original in the best work by De Palma -- he proceeds by way of lavish and intricate webs of allusions to other movies, including, in his late work, his own earlier films.  Passion reprises De Palma's whole career and all its aspects:  there are homicidal twin sisters, overheated lesbian sex scenes, nightmares and dreams nested within dreams, entire sequences play like hallucinations, and, in the film's last forty minutes, the audience is continuously disoriented, wondering whether what we are seeing in some version of reality or, rather, someone's nightmare, or, even, more bizarre, a surrealist film subversively inserted into a standard variety erotic thriller -- that is, not even, necessarily, a dream within a dream, but a Godard-style pastiche of other films.  Everything is citation and intertextual allusion.  Passion is always compelling and entertaining, but you can't figure out what is going on and I would be hard-pressed to summarize the movie's post-modern Expressionist plot.

As far as I can determine the movie involves an ice blonde (of the Hitchcock variety) in conflict with dark-haired woman.  The color scheme is as emphatic as in a late Kurosawa movie with marching color-coded armies.  Both women are casually vicious and conniving.  Blonde and Dark Hair work at an advertising agency located in Berlin for some reason.  (By this stage in his career, De Palma, once one of the most sought after directors in Hollywood, couldn't raise money in the United States:  Passion is a German- French coproduction with a producer call Said Ben Said -- it had only a limited release in the United States and went, I think, straight-to-video.) In an ultimate parody of Hitchcock's extravagant point-of-view mise-en-scene, Dark Hair creates an ad involving something called "Ass-Cam" -- this is a cell-phone perched on a girl's rump that registers the admiring and lecherous responses of people to her ultra-tight jeans.  The notion is witty and deconstructs Hitchcock shooting scenes from the POV of his characters -- for instance, a suicide filmed with the muzzle of the gun turned inward to the camera. The ad turns out to be a huge success but Blonde takes credit for the idea to the dismay of Dark Hair.  Dark Hair revenges herself on Blonde by sleeping with all of Blonde's disreputable boy-toy lovers.  Blonde wants to be transferred to New York but, when the true provenance of the Ass-Cam ad is discovered, Dark Hair gets a promotion and is offered a transfer to New York City.  This triggers a feud between the two women that results in public humiliation and ultimately murder.  Complicating the situation is a strong Lesbian subtext between the women involving much kissing and innuendo.  Further, there is a Redhead who yearns for Dark Hair and conspires with her against Blonde.  The women tell exotic lies about their background, portraying themselves as victims of various kind of fictional trauma.  After the manner of Bergman's Persona, also a theme in De Palma's previous picture Femme Fatale (2002), the females characters bleed into one another and there are dream-like sequences in which one woman acts the part of another -- personalities which seem psychopathic and murderous all seem fused together.  Ultimately, Blonde is murdered and Dark Hair accused of the crime.  By this point, Dark Hair has suffered a psychotic break and is popping pills like candy, drifting in and out of consciousness as cartoonish German cops interrogate and pursue her.  The last sequences in the film are shot through the consciousness and POV of the drugged and crazy Dark Hair and, therefore, confusing and highly stylized.  (And, in a final twist, it turns out that De Palma has deceived us -- the delirious POV of the supposedly drugged Dark Hair turns out to be an indirection; in fact, Dark Hair is only pretending to be impaired and, therefore, the POV to which we are privy is completely unreliable; purporting to show us how Dark Hair seems the world, in fact, this is just another post-modern fiction -- she doesn't see the world the way it is represented to us at all.  This seems sort of a cheat, but De Palma pulls out all the stops to disorient, confuse, and startle his viewers.)  The movie involves blackmail, throat-slashing, people getting strangled and lots of sex, some of it filmed by cellphone.  There are fashion shows and lavishly glamorous images of luxury apartments and corporate conference rooms.  Everything is high-gloss and bright until the film dips in the purported POV of Dark Hair -- then, the color scheme turns to grey and pale blues with striped shadows falling across everyone like the stripes on a prisoner's jump-suit in an old Hollywood movie.  All of this is accompanied by a lavish, swooning score.  

The film is epitomized by a bravura sequence in which De Palma intercuts Dark Hair attending a performance of a ballet to Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun", with a drunken confrontation between Blonde and her disgruntled lover, Dirk -- there are three strands to this imagery:  huge ominous close-ups of Dark Hair's eyes  the ballet shot from various expressive angles, and the inebriated man stumbling around Blonde's property while she prepares herself for a sado-masochistic tryst.  The music pours syrup all over the pictures and De Palma uses a persistent split-screen with the edge of the image sometimes migrating one way or another to orchestrate the three streams of imagery.  It's extremely impressive but the device doesn't really signify anything and I don't know what the Debussy has to do with the movie and, finally, at the end of the film, we are informed that the whole sequence was shot and presented in such a way to once again deceive the audience as to what is going on.  The cubist approach to reality represented by the split-screen sequences isn't analytical -- in fact, the fragmentation of the image and the parallel cutting is just another device to seduce the eye but deceive the mind.

I liked this movie but I can't really recommend it.  It's too footnoted with allusions to other films and too claustrophobic -- you feel like you stuck inside De Palma's head.  To call the acting cartoonish is to insult cartoons.  The dialogue is stilted and artificial and the two lead characters have almost no personality other than grimly portrayed lust and anger.  There is no one in this movie about whom you could possibly give a damn.  The two vipers, Blonde and Dark Hair are played by Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace respectively.