Passion: Venice Review

Having reached a nadir in his mercurial career with conspicuous flops The Black Dahlia (2006)and Redacted (2007), Brian De Palma returns after a half-decade hiatus with glossily twisty Euro-thriller Passion. And while this steamy chronicle of professional and romantic jealousies at a Berlin ad-agency - a sort of 'Mad Women' - showcases eyecatching co-lead turns from Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams, remaking Alain Corneau's 2010 French noir Love Crime proves less a comeback for De Palma and more what economists call a 'dead cat bounce.'

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Generously granted a Venice competition slot five years after Gulf War shocker Redacted took Best Director honors, this overheated, adults-only stew of sapphic tensions looks an unlikely candidate for Lido silverware, as the impressive Rapace faces some stiff competition in a crowded Best Actress field. Distribution status in North America will likely depend on its fate at the Toronto Film Festival where it debuts on September 11, De Palma's 72nd birthday.

Already lined up for theatrical release in France, Germany and the Netherlands next February, Passion will likely end up nabbing a run in U.S. cinemas thanks to the presence of Sherlock Holmes alumna McAdams and fast-rising Swedish star Rapace (Prometheus), who popped up in the last Baker Street adaptation A Game of Shadows. The ongoing popularity of De Palma's back-catalogue, likely to be boosted by the upcoming Carrie remake, will also add some marquee appeal. But overall the blandly-titled Passion appeals as a proposition for the small screen via VOD and DVD, where, as with Femme Fatale (2002), the director's campy excesses may eventually attract a cult following.

Bad 25: Venice Review

Emerging from New York's semi-underground countercultural cinema scene of the late 60s, De Palma established himself as a supreme visual stylist in the next decade thanks to breakthroughs like The Phantom of the Paradise and Carrie. But while his career has included creative and commercial peaks such as The Untouchables, Mission Impossible and the phenomenally enduring Scarface, his track-record has always been unpredictably erratic. Redacted was De Palma's disastrously misguided attempt to engage with hot-button geo-political issues, and now he wisely lowers his sights and retreats to much more comfortable and familiar terrain.

Starring Kristin Scott-Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier, Love Crime was released in France two days before Corneau's death aged 67 in August 2010, and a year later attracted respectable notices and returns during its brief spell in American arthouses. Putting his more luridly operatic spin on the chilly original, De Palma switches the action from Paris to Berlin and alters the dynamic between the central characters by making them roughly the same age.

A blonde, gregarious and glamorous American, McAdams' Christine is an energetic and ambitious high-flyer who's keen to relocate to the company's New York operation. Her colleague Isabelle (Rapace) is a European of indeterminate nationality: mousy and black-clad, she's an 'all work and no play' sort who never switches off even when asleep. When Christine takes credit for one of Isabelle's edgy concepts - "there's no backstabbing here - this is business," she purrs - tensions between the pair quickly escalate.

There are personal complications as well as professional frictions: Isabelle is clandestinely 'seeing' Christine's boyfriend Dirk (Paul Anderson), Christine nurses a secret crush on her colleague/rival, and then there's underling Dani (Karoline Herfurth), who may not be as anodyne as she initially appears. Indeed, with Anderson, yet another Game of Shadows graduate, proving a somewhat dull third 'point' in the love-triangle, the emergence of Dani in the picture's second half ranks alongside the script's few welcome surprises.

By this point, however, proceedings have taken a wayward turn down some unfortunate dead-end alleyways. A grisly murder, the ensuing police investigation - featuring some blundering but impeccably Anglophone cops - and the questionable mental state of a key character are cues for De Palma and his veteran Spanish cinematographer Jos Luis Alcaine to unleash all manner of distorted lighting-effects and camera-angles.

The score by Italian great Pino Donaggio, a frequent De Palma collaborator in his heyday, also takes a heavy-handed turn. The intention is evidently to keep us off-balance and add edgy ambiguity to what may or may not be real, in a picture studded and ultimately overloaded with hallucinatory dream-sequences. But the impact is more irritatingly distracting than pleasurably disorienting, giving proceedings the disreputably high-toned cheesiness of 1980s erotic thrillers.

The director does get to deploy his trademark split-screen technique in one attention-grabbing sequence juxtaposing ballet and murder that achieves the desired confusion in terms of narrative sleight-of-hand. In general, however, the impression is that De Palma is indulging himself with homages to his own Hitchcockian greatest hits, with results that veer close to self-parody on occasion and emphasize just how far this once-outstanding director's creative star has plummeted.

Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition), September 7, 2012.

Production company: SBS Productions
Cast: Noomi Rapace, Rachel McAdams, Paul Anderson, Karoline Herfurth, Rainer Bock
Director / Screenwriter: Brian De Palma, based on the film Love Crime, written by Alain Corneau and Nathalie Carter
Producer: Sad Ben Sad
Executive producers: Alfred Hrmer, Valrie Boyer
Director of photography: Jos Luis Alcaine
Production designer: Cornelia Ott
Music: Pino Donaggio
Costume designer: Karen Muller-Serrau
Editor: Franois Gdigier
Sales agent: Wild Bunch, Paris

No MPAA rating, 101 minutes