Another unexpectedly delicious DVD find, "Femme Fatale," a 2002 Brian de Palma film with a Hitchcockian flavor. I can’t even remember it in the theatres. It must have had a short run, probably because it is more artsy than mainstream films, and less artsy than art house films. “Tweeners” like Femme Fatale often get overlooked, which is too bad. Any movie with Rebecca-Romjin-Stamos in it deserves to be looked at, particularly the scene in the second half where she does a highly seductive bad-girl strip tease in the basement of what looks like a biker bar.
Except…we theorized that any girl who looks like a model, and is dressed in a skimpy leather biker babe outfit, who voraciously flirts with a guy in front of his bar buddies, and then leads him into an adjoining room to do a sexy lap dance for him, probably isn’t going to be left alone with the girl. But this allows Romjin-Stamos’ companion (Antonio Banderas) to do his save-the-girl thing mano-a-mano, rather than having to fight ten tough guys at once, which, realistically, he would have to.
However, this is one of the few I’ve-seen-that-before aspects of the movie. Mostly, it is highly creative and makes you think at the end, “Now, I’ve got to reflect on all this.” That is rare in a film—where you want to close your eyes and ponder the meaning of it all as the closing credits run. As a final inducement to rent it, and without giving away the plot, I’ll just say that any movie that begins with Rebecca-Romjin-Stamos seducing an equally attractive, and scantily clad, supermodel in the restroom at a film festival is definitely worth seeing. And the film gets even better after that rousing start.
Comments