Killer of Sheep [1977]

The debut feature of African-American filmmaker Charles Burnett, Killer of Sheep is considered a cornerstone in American independent filmmaking, and rightly so. Shot in static, grainy black-and-whites and made on weekends for a budget less than $10,000 during Burnett’s student days at UCLA, the film’s making reminded me a lot of Nolan’s impressive debut film Following. Filmed in a Los Angeles ghetto resided mostly by coloured Americans, the largely plot-less movie offers touching, lyrical vignettes of the poor and socially isolated community. The cinéma-vérité style adopted works beautifully as the director goes about observing (without ever examining or putting on trial) the mundane lives of the residents and the simple joys and tribulations therein, through our simple-natured protagonist Stan, the movie’s eponymous killer of sheep, his family, his friends and acquaintances, and his squalid neighbourhood. The most striking aspect about the film lies in its excellent juxtaposition of the unspectacular lives of the adults with the borderline delinquent activities of the children and adolescents. The poignant, bittersweet and humane work is provided a dose of subtle, wry irony through its beautiful jazz and blues soundtrack, and a host of nuanced performances.









Director: Charles Burnett
Genre: Drama/Urban Drama/Americana
Language: English
Country: US

Wild Strawberries [1957]

Often recognized, along with The Seventh Seal, as Swedish maestro Ingmar Bergman’s most iconic work, and perhaps among his most accessible films, Wild Strawberries certainly ranks as a landmark cinematic achievement. Compassion, warm-heartedness and a strong sense of humanism runs through this deeply philosophical treatise on the difficult process of ageing and man’s inherent inability to completely move on from his past disillusionments. Isak Borg, an elderly medical professor on his way to receive an honorary degree from his alma mater, is a man ridden with guilt and disappointment – principally for matters relating to the heart and relationships. Thus his road journey along with his daughter-in-law Marianne turns out to be less a physical one and more a surreal, even symbolic, travel through the memories of his childhood, nightmares, fears, trampled dreams, unrequited love, emotional turmoil, regrets, his Freudian obsession with death, and his familial failures, finally achieving a small sense of peace with himself at the end of the road. The film is carried by the towering performance of celebrated Scandinavian director Victor Sjostrom as the egotistic but sympathetic Isak, with a fascinating supporting turn by Ingrid Thulin as the beautiful but emotionally troubled Marianne. The complex, disturbing dream sequences are alone worth their weight in gold.








Director: Ingmar Bergman
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Surreal Drama/Family Drama/Road Movie
Language: Swedish
Country: Sweden

Raajneeti (Politics) [2010]

Prakash Jha’s Raajneeti, as the name suggests, is a no-holes-barred indictment against dynasty-based, votebank, dirty politics that is quite prevalent in India, in general, and in the North Indian states, in particular. This Mahabharata-weds-Godfather epic shows two warring political families who would go to any lengths necessary, including blackmail and murder, in order for them to win the Chief Minister-ship of the state. The film boasts of a packed, powerhouse starcast – Nana Patekar has given the best performance of the lot, with able turns by Manoj Bajpayee, Ajay Devgan and Arjun Rampal; Ranbir Kapoor has turned out to be a surprising revelation as the cool, sinsister Michael Corleone-esque protagonist; even veteran actor Naseeruddin Shah has shone in his cameo as a firebrand Communist leader. Katrina Kaif, however, is predictably horrendous, and her horrible accent has turned out to be a hilarious parody of Sonia Gandhi, intentionally or otherwise. Though eminently watchable, at the end of the day, the film has turned out to be rather a mixed bad courtesy, largely, the overblown length. A more compact script and tighter editing might have made this reasonably effective film a far more powerful piece of work.








Director: Prakash Jha
Genre: Drama/Political Drama/Ensemble Film
Language: Hindi
Country: India

Citizen Kane [1941]

Citizen Kane, quite astonishingly Orson Welles’ debut feature, is often cited as the greatest movie ever made; therefore I watched the film fully aware of its hallowed status among critics, scholars and filmmakers. So here’s the deal – I wasn’t overwhelmed by the film, or rather, not as much as would have been deemed commensurate with the enormous reputation that precedes it. The film-a-clef starts off with newspaper mogul Charles Forster Kane (commandingly portrayed by Welles himself) uttering the iconic last word “Rosebud” before his death in his palatial mansion. As a reporter, hoping to decipher the mystery behind the strange last word, starts interviewing the various people who knew Kane from close quarters, what emerges is the life of a singularly ambitious yet deeply lonely man otherwise known to the world as a powerful, visionary and filthy rich media magnate who had once harboured gubernatorial aspirations. And the more he goes about arranging the jigsaw puzzle and thus deconstructing the mythic nature of the man, the more he gets convinced that a single word can never encapsulate such complex a persona. William Randolph Hearst, whose life allegedly formed the basis of Kane’s character, infamously tried to destroy the film, but to no avail. The film’s forte lies in its pioneering technical accomplishments – virtuoso non-linear storytelling, a host of memorable deep focus shots, expressionistic photography with great usage of both low-angle and overhead shots, to name a few.








Director: Orson Welles
Genre: Drama
Language: English
Country: US

Apocalypse Now [1979]

Apocalypse Now, often called Francis Ford Coppola’s last great movie, almost never got made, because of shooting delays and overshoot of budget; fortunately for us, Coppola somehow managed pool in his money and got it done. The film’s dazzling and hallucinatory opening sequence – images of napalm bombing juxtaposed with Martin Sheen’s Capt. Willard suffering in a sweaty, sleazy hotel room, with The Door’s mesmerizing “The End” ironically playing in the background – has attained legendary status. The plot concerns Willard being sent on a clandestine mission to Cambodia to assassinate Kurtz, a brilliant renegade Colonel who, the army top brass feels, has gone insane. A harrowing portrait of the Vietnam War and a nightmarish vision of the characters’ psychoses and their collective descent into madness, the film is less about the actual assassination and more about Willard’s life-altering Odyssey and his growing obsession with Kurtz. Martin Sheen is amazing as the moody, laconic and emotionally detached Willard. The film also boasts of two terrific supporting roles in the form of Robert Duval’s psychotic, Wagner-loving Col. Kilgore, and Dennis Hopper’s crazy photojournalist who worships Kurtz as if he were god. Unfortunately, Marlon Brando doesn’t really manage to live up to the electric buildup that his character (Kurtz) is given in the first three-quarters of the film.








Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Genre: War Epic/Adventure
Language: English
Country: US

Galpo Holeo Satyi (Stranger than Fiction) [1966]

Galpa Holeo Satyi, directed by Tapan Sinha (who I like to call the “Fourth Musketeer” of Bengali cinema), ranks as one of the most popular and loved Bengali movies ever made, along with the likes of Goopi Gyne Bagha Byne, Saptapadi, etc. The movie is about a dysfunctional middle-class Bengali joint-family filled to brim with a plethora of petty issues, so much so that there isn’t an iota of peace, and compounded by the fact that no domestic help manages to survive the madness and chaos that rules in their home – if it may be called one. And then, as a boon from the heavens, there arrives a mysterious housekeeper who is Chaplinesque in the truest sense of the word – both in terms of his short physical stature, interesting moustache and comic persona, and where having dollops of humanism and a heart of gold are concerned. He doesn’t just do the daily chores – and what a job he does! – but also manages to unite the disparate individuals back into a family that cares for each other. The best aspect of the film is that its humour is never crass or saccharine; it’s subtle, witty, intelligent and ageless, and wonderfully masks its social message, ensuring that it never interferes with the narrative. The film boasts of exemplary performances from its ensemble cast, led by the extraordinary talent that was Rabi Ghosh, arguably one of the greatest comic actors that Indian cinema has ever had.






Director: Tapan Sinha
Genre: Comedy/Human Drama/Family Comedy/Ensemble Film
Language: Bengali
Country: India

Rififi (Du Rififi Chez les Hommes) [1955]

Though released in the same year as another memorable French caper film, Bob Le Flambeur, American expat Jules Dassin’s Rififi was diametrically opposite to the delicious Jean-Pierre Melville film. Where the former was light-hearted and stylish, the latter was tense and bleak – more akin to its American counterparts The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing. When world-weary and ageing former convict is given the idea of a neat job by his pals, you know there’s trouble waiting for them. They, along with an Italian safe-cracker, exquisitely plan and rob a near-impregnable jewelry shop – the half-hour long heist sequence, shown in meticulous detail, is a display of dazzling audacity – only to be undone by a moment of human weakness. Soon enough there’s the Italian (played by Dassin himself) breaking the most sacred rule among criminals, that you don’t rat on your friends, followed by kidnap, gang violence and murder, and culminating, not unexpectedly, in a fatalistic ending commensurate with the school of filmmaking it belongs to. Boasting of great set-pieces, not least of all being the classic robbery sequence, the lusciously shot film also forms a hard-boiled ode to Paris, anything but the City of Lights if this landmark, doom-laden film noir were to go by.









Director: Jules Dassin
Genre: Crime Thriller/Film Noir/Heist Film/Gangster
Language: French
Country: France

24 [2001-2010]

-->24 has been ranked as one of the greatest television series ever made, and why not? The adrenaline-fuelled thrill-a-minute, err, thrill-a-second ride, where lone ranger and one-man-army Jack Bauer, for whom ends justify the means, works against the ethical and administrative purview of CTU (Counter-Terrorist Unit), and the American government at times, to bring people, corporations and even Heads of State to justice, had me glued to my chair from start to finish every single season. Even when the show veered towards ludicrosity and been-there-seen-that territory, it never slackened pace or went easy on violence for once, or for that matter, shied from throwing pointed jabs at everything from excess bureaucracy and corrupt corporations to political conspiracies and government cover-ups. Real politic has often been the dominant theme of the series, where each season showed the events of a single day in real-time. The show also gave us a host of memorable characters – the ever reliable and neurotic Chloe O’Brian, expert fellow agents Tony Almeida and Cole Ortiz who aren’t very different from Bauer, Jack’s attractive nemesis in the first few seasons – Nina Myers, Tony’s wife Michelle Dessler, the soft-spoken Bill Buchanan, Jack’s one-time fiancé Audrey Reines, his daughter Kim with whom he shares an on-off relationship, and of course the beautiful but fragile Renee Walker who triggers Jack into ultra revenge-mode going into the exceptional finale of Season 8, the last in the series. We’ve also had a number of memorable US Presidents, from the commanding David Palmer to the self-serving Charles Logan and the upright Alison Taylor. And in Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer we’ve had a flawed but imperious protagonist worthy of being included in the elite group of indestructible action-heroes populated by the likes of Sly Stallone’s Rambo, Bruce Willis’ John McClane, Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, Schwarzenegger's John Matrix et al.







Creators: Joel Surnow & Robert Cochran
Genre: Thriller/Political Thriller/Action/TV Series
Language: English
Country: US

Mahanagar@Kolkata (Metropolis@Calcutta) [2010]

Suman Mukhopadhyay, whose brilliant debut feature Herbert was based on Nabarun Bhattacharya’s novella of the same, chose to adapt three short stories of the author this time – Ek Tukro Nylon-er Dori; Amar Kono Bhoy Nei To? and Angshik Chandragrahan (loosely translated as, A Piece of Nylon Cord; I Have Nothing to Fear, Right? and Partial Lunar Eclipse, respectively). The interweaving stories present three random vignettes of the teeming metropolis in this dark and experimental work. The first segment, about the unlikely acquaintance between an upper middle class man (Anjan Dutt) and a lower middle class person (Biplab Chatterjee) one bloody night outside a hospital, borders on psychological terror; the second segment, which follows an unemployed elderly person (Arun Mukhopadhyay) who gets gripped with fear and paranoia thanks to the escalating violence around him, is darkly funny and ironic; and the third segment, which is about the destructive ménage à trois between a high-flying, suicidal professional (Chandan Roy Sanyal), his beautiful wife (Rituparna Sengupta) and his voluptuous, Marx-quoting mistress (Sreelekha Mitra), is psychedelic and surreal. The grim ode to the seedy underbelly of Kolkata (Calcutta) has as its themes urban paranoia, insecurities and existential detachment, and they have been amply bolstered by Fossils frontman Rupam Islam’s splendid, edgy rock ballads. The film is very well enacted by its ensemble cast, with the standout performance coming from Arun Mukhopadhyay, the director’s father.








Director: Suman Mukhopadhyay
Genre: Drama/Black Comedy/Psychological Drama/Existential Drama/Experimental
Language: Bengali
Country: India

Charlie Chan Collection [1946-1947]

Turner Classic Movies (TCM), a subsidiary of Time-Warner (still known as Warner Bros. among old-timers) has been kind enough to send me their newest release, a boxset comprising of 4 Charlie Chan movies – Dark Alibi, Dangerous Money, The Trap, and The Chinese Ring, for review at my site. For the uninitiated, Charlie Chan, the character created by Earl Derr Biggers, is a Chinese-American detective who has featured in over a dozen low-budget, noir-ish crime/mystery films.

Dark Alibi (1946) has Chan trying to save a former convict who, he’s convinced, is innocent of the bank robbery charges for which he’s been sentenced to death. In Dangerous Money (1946), set mostly aboard a ship and on an island, Chan tries to uncover a trail of hot money that results in a series of inexplicable murders. The Trap (1946), the last movie to star Sydney Toler as the investigator, has Chan trying to solve the strangulation murders of pretty young showgirls on vacation. And finally, in The Chinese Ring (1947), Chan gets busy uncovering the mysterious murder of a Chinese princess at his very home, that almost gets him killed.

Dark Alibi, without doubt, is the best of the lot, and might even be categorized as a film noir. The films go downhill from here, despite the presence of Sydney Toller as the deadpan, wisecracking detective, courtesy some one-dimensional plots and characters. The series is, however, saved in the end by The Chinese Ring, what with its fine noirish atmospherics and shady characters, though Roland Winters, cast as Charlie Chan in this film, never really managed to hold a candle to Toller’s Charlie Chan. Mantan Moreland, as Chan’s chauffeur and sidekick Birmingham, is absolutely hilarious and provides enough comic relief.

The Charlie Chan suite has been presented by TCM Spotlight in a very well designed pack worth the buy. Though the dvd-s do not boast of any extra features, the important aspect is that the print quality – both picture and sound, of all the four films is exceptional and the transfer too is stunning, despite the films being over 60 years old. The boxset should be a collector’s item for all you Charlie Chan aficionados out there.










Directors: Phil Karlson/Terry O. Morse/Howard Bretherton/William Beaudine
Genre: Crime Thriller/Mystery/Film Noir
Language: English
Country: US

Annie Hall [1977]

If there’s one movie that director-writer-actor Woody Allen will always be remembered by, it would have to be Annie Hall – a seminal and incredibly witty deconstruction of an urban relationship… and a romantic comedy if you can really call it one. This was also perhaps the inimitable auteur’s most personal, even semi-autobiographical, film, something he made sure to poke fun at in the finale. The movie has Allen playing Alvy Singer, a New York-based neurotic, pessimistic, “hostile” and intellectual stand-up comedian, recounting his falling in and then out of relationship with Diane Keaton's shy and impulsive wannabe singer called Annie Hall, who’s everything that Alvy isn’t, and vice-versa. Contemporary, hilarious, intelligent, freewheeling and matured, brilliantly laced with wry and self-deprecating humour, punctuated throughout its length with immensely quotable one-liners and wisecracks that are so quintessentially Woody Allen, and filled to brim with cultural references ranging from Bergman to Capote to Freud to Groucho Marx, the film is the cinematic equivalent of a good wine – you need to allow it grow onto you, but once you do, you won’t be able to have enough of it. Interestingly, Allen also made heavy use of a host of filming techniques and gags, ranging from split screens, contradictory subtitles and adult time travels, to stuff like addressing the camera and even animes!








Director: Woody Allen
Genre: Comedy/Romantic Comedy/Satire/Urban Comedy
Language: English
Country: US

2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]

We see a human for the first time nearly 20 minutes into the movie, and hear human voice another 5 minutes later; further, the last 25-odd minutes are again devoid of any dialogues – now that’s the kind of audacity few filmmakers apart from Stanley Kubrick could have displayed. A visual feast like few others, and comprising of some of the most groundbreaking, if understated, special effects for its times, the pristine white, claustrophobic and disorienting interiors of the spaceship must have been the inspiration behind Ridley Scott’s Alien a decade later. Yet, all its technical brilliance apart, the movie is ultimately an intellectually challenging, visceral, ominous, unsettling and poetic meditation on the very framework used to create the film – technology, culminating in a climax that is as mind-bending as it is surreal. By brilliantly juxtaposing the eerie silence of outer space with beautiful Classical-based soundtrack, the movie has at its core a mysterious black monolithic slab with the ability to emit powerful radiations and supposedly placed by an intelligent life form, that propels and becomes a contemporary to man’s evolution from a primeval ape to ones capable of advanced space exploration. Ironically, the film caused “cultural shock” and “social disorientation” when released at the height of the space-race between the US and the erstwhile USSR, the very thing that the scientists try to protect civilians from in the film.

 

   

 

 

Director: Stanley Kubrick 

Genre: Sci-Fi/Horror/Fantasy/Avant-Garde 

Language: English 

Country: UK/US

The Ice Storm [1997]

A searing deconstruction of the American suburbia, Ang Lee’s much acclaimed The Ice Storm has as its company such disconsolate expositions on dysfunction and malaise as the likes of American Beauty and Little Children. Though not as relentlessly dark as the latter two, the film is no less distressing or, well, wintry. Set during one particularly cold Thanksgiving weekend in the 70’s in the wealthy suburbs of New York City, the film has at its centre an affluent family that is genial and civil on the outside, but crumbling from inside. The father (Kevin Kline) is having an affair with his attractive but frosty neighbour (Sigourney Weaver), the frigid mother (Joan Allen) is suffering from existential crises of her own, their daughter (Christiana Ricci) has become overtly promiscuous with their neighbour’s son (Elijah Wood) and his brother and emotionally detached, while their son (Tobey Maguire), one of the few characters deserving the audience’s sympathy and the movie’s mouthpiece, has fallen for a girl (Katie Holmes) who doesn’t seem to reciprocate his feelings. The film is replete with ironies, not least of all being, as this web of infidelity, rebelliousness and desperation is unfolding, threatening to rip the family apart, the Watergate Scandal is quietly playing in the background. The film, that forms a fine zeitgeist of the times portrayed, is exceptionally well performed by its ensemble cast, with the young brigade of Ricci, Maguire and Wood being especially brilliant.








Director: Ang Lee
Genre: Drama/Family Drama/Ensemble Film
Language: English
Country: US

Rushmore [1998]

Wes Anderson, one of the most highly regarded American filmmakers working today, garnered a lot of acclaim with his debut Indie feature Bottle Rocket. But it was his sophomore effort Rushmore that put him firmly and squarely on the world map. Co-written with college buddy Owen Wilson, the movie, like his other films, is quirky, irreverent, idiosyncratic and darkly funny, with latent yet palpable layers of humanism firmly embedded in the otherwise whimsical coming-of-age tale. Jason Schwartzman played the role of Max, a 15-year old student at an exclusive school called Rushmore who is exceptionally active in a horde of extra-curricular activities but for academics, to perfection. He meets, and falls heads-over-heels with the beautiful but emotionally debilitated first-grade teacher Miss Cross (lovingly portrayed by Olivia Williams). Meanwhile, an eccentric but world-weary business tycoon called Mr. Blume (played quite brilliantly by the amazing as always Bill Murray), who Max has befriended, also finds himself falling for the lady, thus setting the three for a collision course that eventually brings the them out of their self-made “little boxes”, as Pete Seeger would have said, and closer both to themselves and to each other. The combination of the breezy, unpredictable narrative, the dry and off-balancing wit and surprising emotional depth of the script, the colourful visuals and the excellent 60’s and 70’s pop soundtrack have all joined forces to make this offbeat film a cult classic among movie lovers.









Director: Wes Anderson
Genre: Comedy Drama/Black Comedy/Coming-of-Age
Language: English
Country: US

Ganashatru (An Enemy of the People) [1989]

Ganashatru, --> literally ‘An Enemy of the People’, was master auteur Satyajit Ray’s adaptation of the legendary play of the same name by Henrik Ibsen. Ray’s health was deteriorating alarmingly during this time and he was compelled to have a pacemaker placed in him. Consequently, the shooting was confined mostly to interiors. Having said that, though the film is considered among Ray’s lesser works, it was a pretty tight, engaging and competent film nonetheless – such is the quality of Ray’s oeuvre. The film, set in a small, peaceful town near Calcutta, has at its forefront the age-hold struggle between faith and science. Ashoke Gupta, a revered doctor who, while investigating a series of jaundice cases, becomes convinced that the ‘holy water’ being provided by a popular temple is the cause of those cases. And that sets him on collision course with his self-serving younger brother, who also happens to be the Mayor of the town, and who is absolutely opposed to Ashoke’s wanting to educate the people of it either through a newspaper article or ia public speaking. The film, which has a reasonably satisfying climax, is solidly performed by a motley crew of such respected actors like (Ray favourite and regular) Soumitra Chatterjee, Dhritiman Chatterjee, Mamata Shankar, Dipankar Dey et al.

Director: Satyajit Ray
Genre: Drama/Social Drama
Language: Bengali
Country: India

Dead Reckoning [1947]

Dead Reckoning has the kind of dialogues, plot and feel to it that it could very well have been straight out of a Raymond Chandler story. And incidentally or accidentally, the principal protagonist, a not-so-subtle variation of Phillip Marlowe, was enacted by none other than Humphrey Bogart himself. Bogart, excellent as always in the kind of role perhaps only he could enact, starred as Rip Murdock, a cynical war hero who gets mired in a complex web of intrigue, blackmail, deceit, double crosses and murder, when he starts investigating, against the wishes of a powerful mobster and owner of a sleazy gambling joint, the mysterious disappearance of his army buddy. In the process he gets acquainted with, among others, a beautiful heartbreaker, former crooner and lethal femme fatale Coral aka "Dusty", very well performed by Lizabeth Scott (some feel, wrongly in my opinion, that she was nothing more than a stand-in for Lauren Bacall). The film is replete with shady thugs, and a slew of utterly memorable hardboiled dialogues and wisecracks that Bogart made absolutely his own. The labyrinthine and fatalist plot is very well structured and paced as to keep one glued right till the finale that reminded me a lot about how Out of the Past ended.








Director: John Cromwell
Genre: Film Noir/Crime Thriller/Gangster/Mystery
Language: English
Country: US

In Cold Blood [1967]

Richard Brooks’ In Cold Blood is a stylish dramatisation of the renowned non-fiction novel of the same name by Truman Capote. Though essentially made to cash in on the book’s fame, and hence made so as to closely follow the book’s structuring of the events, it has nonetheless managed to stand on its own as a work of merit and calibre. Brilliantly photographed in expressionistic black-and-whites, mostly employing claustrophobic visuals and low-angle shots, and backed by a memorable jazz-styled score, the movie bears close resemblance to classic era film noirs in terms of mood and atmospherics, though it doesn’t really qualify as one. For the uninitiated, the movie chronicles the real-life event of two delinquent crackerjack youths, Dick and Perry (extremely well acted by the respective leads), killing respectable rancher Herbert Clutter and his family in cold blood for a meager sum of money, and how they are successful pursued by the homicide cop Alvin Dewey Jr. and sent to the gallows to meet their fates. The voiceovers near the finale seemed a bit jarring and hence should have been avoided. However, that apart, the movie managed to be not just gripping, but even quite breathtaking at times.








Director: Richard Brooks
Genre: Crime Drama/Docu-fiction
Language: English
Country: US

Asukh (Malaise) [1999]

The stretch from his debut feature Hirer Angti and roughly culminating with Utsab and Shubho Mahurat – his finest works till date, saw Bengali auteur Rituparno Ghosh at his most dizzying best, and Asukh released right at the middle of this immensely creative phase of his career. The film follows parallel narratives. The present shows Rohini (marvelously portrayed by Debashree Roy), a popular actress but an emotionally vulnerable lady addicted to sleeping pills, trying to cope with her mother’s illness, which ends up triggering a subtle schism with her father (yet another stellar performance by veteran thespian Soumitra Chatterjee). Flashbacks, meanwhile, show the slow disintegration of her relationship with her fiancé because of his increasing closeness with a younger upcoming actress, which in many ways ends up defining her present vulnerability, suspicious disposition and a perpetual feeling of betrayal which gets extended to include her father as well. An intense, brooding and thoroughly brilliant character study, Ghosh managed to capture the nuances of Rohini’s relationships and her internal turmoil through exceptional use of Tagore’s poems. The leisurely paced film is marvelously scored and photographed.







Director: Rituparno Ghosh
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Family Drama
Language: Bengali
Country: India

Femme Fatale [2002]

If you ever want to see the cinematic expression of “style over substance”, Femme Fatale is the movie to watch. In fact, but for Brian De Palma’s presence, this was a movie tailor-made for a trashy direct-to-video thriller that wouldn’t have attracted even a cursory glance from anyone. Palma must have had one hell of a fun time making this unabashedly stylish neo-noir, what with split screens, outlandish plot developments, snazzy craftsmanship and carefree indulgence into “cool factor”, so much so that the inane pulpy plot, wafer-thin characterizations and bizarre coincidences somehow do not come into way of the wholesome entertainment the movie provides. The movie starts off with the famous climax scene from Billy Wilder’s classic noir Double Indemnity. The plot is so gleefully byzantine and well, ludicrous, that I won’t even go into that; suffice it to say, the film abounds in amoral characters, double (even triple) crosses and enough of sleazefest to make this one of your guilty pleasures. Rebecca Romjin is smoking hot as a deliriously twisted femme fatale and her emotionally broken doppelganger, while Antonio Banderas’ turn as a down-and-out paparazzo is a really funny watch. It has at times been referred to as the lunatic and brazen half-brother of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, and why not?








Director: Brian De Palma
Genre: Thriller/Crime Thriller/Mystery/Post-Noir
Language: English/French
Country: US