I have a book called American Film Now, written by James Monaco and published in 1979, which includes a chapter on seven “whiz kids” – “directors who’ve become star celebrities”: Bogdanovich, Friedkin, Scorsese, De Palma, Lucas, Spielberg and Schrader. Remarkably, all seven are still making films thirty-five years on, and they’ve all maintained their high profiles (in contrast, one of Monaco’s choices for the five directors then “at the ‘hot center’ of American film, Michael Ritchie, is barely remembered now, and another, Paul Mazursky, isn’t generally esteemed at that level). Scorsese, Spielberg and Lucas could hardly have been more successful; Bogdanovich and Friedkin have made it to elder statesman status through severe ups and downs; Schrader, inherently more of an outsider, got more publicity than he has in years (for better and for worse) with his recent movie The Canyons.
Brian De Palma
Which leaves the strange case of Brian De
Palma. He’s widely admired for his immense skill, and several of his films – Scarface, Carrie, The Untouchables – are
widely viewed as modern classics. But there’s also a widespread sense that he
somehow fell short, having spent too much time trying to emulate Alfred
Hitchcock, or repeating himself, or wasting his efforts on second-rate
material, or all three at once. Even thirty-five years ago, commenting on the
successive projects of Carrie and The Fury, Monaco commented that “it’s
hard to tell what De Palma had in mind taking on a project so similar to the
one he had just completed” – to this day, his decisions often evoke similar
bemusement. Many of his pictures seem like “assignments” that might have been
taken on by someone else (something that seldom applies to the works of most of
the others I mentioned): his most overtly ambitious or “relevant” films, like The Bonfire of the Vanities, are often
among his weakest, as if confirming his limitations.
This certainly held for his most recent
film, Redacted, which dealt with the
Iraq war, via the conceit that everything in the movie is being intermediated
–through surveillance cameras, or webcams, or so forth. “Isn’t it ironic,” said
De Palma at the time, “that in order to tell the truth about Iraq, you have to
create the truth?” But this “truth” as De Palma presented it, although
apparently based on real events, focused on a sensational incident hardly
representative of the individual contribution of most soldiers (and not at all
of the broader issues, except in the most crassly symbolic sense). Some
effective moments aside, it was mostly stilted and juvenile and just not very
useful, suggesting De Palma’s long immersion in cinema had muffled, if not
destroyed his real-world antennae.
Passion
It’s certainly possible to detect recurring
thematic interests in his work. Writing on the Senses of Cinema website, Keith Uhlich suggests for instance that
“De Palma forces us to remember, to confront our dark pasts and secrets in an
effort at recognizing our perpetual humanity.” I must admit though I’d find it
hard to reach that same judgment – at the very least, De Palma seems to express
the darkness and the secrets more fully than the humanity.
The title of Monaco’s old book, American Film Now, resonates oddly
against De Palma’s recent work, and it’s interesting to apply it word by word
to his new film Passion. Firstly, the
director himself is almost the only American element in there - it’s a
German-French co-production, set notionally in Germany but more generally in
some unspecifiable Euro-zone, starring the Swedish Noomi Rapace and the
Canadian Rachel McAdams. As for “Now” – Passion
takes place in the present day, in a corporate world influenced by YouTube and
viral marketing, but De Palma (as if acknowledging the failure of Redacted) shows little interest in these
elements, approaching events as a largely disembodied series of formally
enacted encounters and rituals.
Which leaves “Film.” It’s ironic that Passion will largely be seen on-demand
(although it’s also playing, as I write, on one local screen too, at the Carlton)
because it might be taken as the knowing last gasp of an immersive brand of
“pure” cinema – something you consciously experience as an aesthetic creation,
an appropriation of structures and devices and techniques associated with the
medium’s classical heyday (with Hitchcock, once again, in particular).
In the most striking sequence, De Palma
uses a split screen: on the left, Rapace’s character watches a ballet duet; on
the right, McAdams’ character takes a shower and prepares for a sexual
encounter. It’s a masterful play of movement, stillness, sensuality, desire,
with the eerie stares of the dancers implicitly accusing us of complicity in
the narrative trap that’s being laid. But one could as easily imagine coming
across this sequence as a stand-alone short creation, projected in a dark room
in the basement of a modern art gallery. It’s an expression both of hope and
despair, embodying De Palma’s undiminished belief in the thrill and virtue of
such cinematic expression, and his sense of its shrinking place in the world. A
similar ambiguity underlies the film’s title – as numerous writers have pointed
out, Passion is an odd title for such
a tightly controlled work.
Waking Dream
McAdams plays Christine, an executive at
the German branch of a global advertising agency, who plans to leap up to the
New York office by taking credit for a brilliant idea created by Isabelle
(Rapace). The plan stalls when Isabelle asserts herself, and the relationship
between the two women becomes increasingly toxic; Christine keeps developing
ways to belittle Isabelle, who starts popping pills and becoming unstable. The
film largely enacts Uhlich’s comment that in De Palma’s work: “Helplessness is
a constant…a De Palma protagonist rarely has control over the events in which
they find themselves embroiled.” It’s best taken, I think, as a sort of waking
dream in which the true weight and earthly consequence of actions and events
becomes hard to determine; the normal
cinematic language of created realism yields to increasing abstraction,
reinforced by the narrative’s escalating confusion about inner states and outer
realities. On that basis, I liked the film much more than not, but I’m not sure
I know anyone to whom I could confidently recommend it.
Because, sadly, it’s not clear who cares anymore – and it feels like De Palma might know that too. In the film’s very last moment, one of the characters slumps on the bed, her fate sealed, at the end of another bravura sequence that introduces a new form of disorientation even as it wraps up certain elements: the screen cuts to black and the words “The End” carry unusual finality. Even if this doesn’t turn out to be De Palma’s last film (and as he’s now 73, with a series of financial and critical flops behind him, it certainly might be), it seems like an assertion that there’s nowhere else for him to go.
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