Thursday, November 21, 2013

Dressed to Shop

Passion (2012)
directed by Brian De Palma
rating: 2 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

This month's Vogue includes a Miu Miu ad campaign with Léa Seydoux and Adèle Exarchopoulos that made me rethink that "model pretty" comment in my Blue is the Warmest Color review. Modeling and acting make different demands, but Exarchopoulos, in particular, is indistinguishable done up in "girlish styling" from a dozen women I passed en route to work this morning. She's pretty, but so are a lot of people. In resort wear with styled hair and makeup, she mostly just looks young (after all, she is).

I love Brian De Palma movies and one of the reasons I love them is that his sexual obsessions involve grown-ups. Nancy Allen was 30 in Dressed to Kill (which also starred a 50-year old Angie Dickinson). Melanie Griffith was 27 in Body Double. In Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, and Femme Fatale--I'm listing my favorites--the female leads are closer to my age (I'm 33) than 18. Even 17-year old Carrie was played by 26-year old Sissy Spacek. He has his hang-ups but youth isn't one of them.

The women who star in Passion--Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams--are 33 and 35. Neither one of them plays a mother and neither character is married. Each enjoys casual sex but De Palma does not infantilize that part of their personalities by making them coquettish or demure. Men in the movie see their strength and appetites and fall like flies.

That is the point, of course: Christine and Isabelle are... passionate! They are demanding and accomplished. Doubles, sisters, split screens, old hat. This time, the crime turns, more or less, on Christine's desire to move to New York City (from Berlin), which, by all appearances, she has more than enough money to do anytime she wants. But she wants to do it in the context of a promotion, for some reason, and so exploits her subordinate, Isabelle, and takes credit for a successful viral ad campaign.

Is that the price of international financing? To shoot your film in sleek, borrowed locations that emphasize how rich, how comfortable, your characters are? Because the obvious motivations for murder--greed, lust, obsession--are undercut completely by the entitled corporate culture that both women live in. They both have nice offices and nice apartments and probably keep up with resort wear. They're bored, something no responsible De Palma heroine should ever have to be.