Yes, you can like the works of a filmmaker even if he begins to make a very different kind of film. Case in point: Brian De Palma.
When I heard that Brian De Palma had a new movie out – Passion, inspired by the French thriller Love Crime – I went to Rotten Tomatoes to see the consensus, to see if the filmmaker’s luck had finally turned with the critics. (They haven’t been kind to his films since the first – and, in my opinion, the best – Mission: Impossible movie in 1996.) But no. The approval rating was a miserable 36 per cent, which is in roughly the same range as the ratings for the post- Mission: Impossible movies: Snake Eyes (40 per cent), Mission to Mars (25), Femme Fatale (48), The Black Dahlia (32) and redacted (44). I’m not really surprised. The adult thriller with psychosexual overtones – something of a De Palma specialty – hasn’t been very popular of late. But I also think that people may be missing something in evaluating De Palma. They’re probably coming at him as an A-grade director, which he once was, but perhaps the key to his recent work is to acknowledge that he’s using those same skills with lesser material, and he’s become, therefore, an A-grade B-movie director.
I haven’t seen redacted, but these post-Mission: Impossible films are delicious explorations of form. The filmmaking is so slick, so in control, that the plot, the performances become secondary. Most filmmakers these days are so afraid of losing the interest of their audience that they keep cutting even during conversations, when a master frame can easily hold both (or however many there are) conversationalists. We’ll keep cutting to the first speaker, then the second, then maybe to a shot with both, and this constant change of perspective lends an artificially amped-up momentum to the proceedings. There’s the (false) sense that the conversation itself has become more dynamic. But De Palma, from the beginning of his career, has favoured long takes with fewer cuts and this results in a very different kind of dynamism. And the material he’s been choosing of late lends itself to this technique. (See The Black Dahlia, where a smooth circling shot covers the interrogation of a suspect. In a subsequent scene a master shot covers four men in a locker room and a slow zoom-in isolates the reactions we’re meant to see.) De Palma may be making schlock, but it’s very classy schlock (which is more than what you can say about another filmmaker’s schlock).
Take the opening of Femme Fatale. Of the film, the critic David Edelstein said, “At its greatest, in Carrie (1976), Blow Out (1981), Casualties of War (1989), and much of Carlito’s Way (1993), [De Palma’s] technique adds up to more than bravura showmanship. But even when it doesn’t—as in his new Femme Fatale —it’s like an outrageous new Ben & Jerry’s flavor for thriller gluttons. So, dig in.”And we dig in from the very first frame, where we see, on a television set, the climax of Double Indemnity. But we’re really seeing two images, the black-and-white frames from the classic noir, and the fleshy tones of a woman who’s watching the film (De Palma’s always been interested in watching) – she’s reflected on the television set. There’s a femme fatale on screen and a femme fatale off it. The camera tracks back slowly, and we have before us a visual representation of what this woman will say later: “I’m a bad girl… Real bad. Rotten to the heart.” How many filmmakers bother to infuse even this amount of artistry into their movies anymore?
I’m not talking about the Paul Thomas Andersons and the Wes Andersons and the Sofia Coppolas, or even the Martin Scorseses, to take the name of a filmmaker who is De Palma’s contemporary. I’m simply talking about the others, the people who make the cinematic equivalent of junk food that we crave once in a while because we cannot always be having cinematic spinach. Few, if any, of those filmmakers approach their work with the craft of De Palma. Take Mission to Mars. We see films set in space all the time, but the grace notes in these films, the little things tucked away in the corners that have no direct relation to the plot or the characters, may involve, at best, some humour, or a reference to “back home on Earth.” But here, we have a bit of dialogue early on about a character who doesn’t like to dance and his wife who insists on taking dancing lessons before her sister’s wedding, and we get the payoff later in a scene where this couple is in space and the husband finds himself dance-ready due to the anti-gravity. “Zero G,” he says. “My last chance to be graceful.” It’s a gorgeous grace note.
Part of the resistance to De Palma’s recent work comes, I suspect, from the tendency of viewers (critics as well as audiences) to fix a filmmaker as this guy who does these things and who should keep doing these things – and if he does other things, then there’s a disconnect. Few viewers seem to want to engage with De Palma once he stopped making movies – in the sense of a plot populated with characters that we are invested in – and started making these empty shell-like formal experiments, with ludicrous plots and characters that barely seem human. I just look at it as two phases of a filmmaker’s career. He did that then. He does this now. And if what he’s doing now doesn’t resonate as much as what he did then, it’s still fascinating at a formal level – not just because of the camera moves but also because there’s a sense of abstraction here, a sense of stripping away everything that’s superfluous and getting to the mechanics of moviemaking, the nuts and bolts. You may not put these films in your year-end best-of lists, but they’re not dismissible either.
Take The Black Dahlia. As a movie in the traditional sense, it fails on almost every level. The acting is strictly second-rate, a bunch of uneasy performers playing dress-up in a period piece. And the plot, about the investigation around the murder of a 1940s starlet, should drum up the usual movie responses – tension, sympathy, fear – but it doesn’t, mostly. But focus on the mechanics, not the what but the how, and you can’t stop watching – whether it’s the first time we glimpse Scarlett Johansson (in extreme close-up; the camera practically bounds up to her) or the double murder on an ornate flight of stairs. There’s a tricky question underlying this: Why do we grant some filmmakers this leeway, this benefit of the doubt that there’s something else than just style over substance? The answer comes from the heart sometimes (old times, and all that) and sometimes from the gut. We feel it – the effort in the planning, the staging, the refusal to settle for easy solutions, and we acknowledge the parts, if not the whole.
Lights, Camera, Conversation… is a weekly dose of cud-chewing over what Satyajit Ray called Our Films Their Films. An edited version of this piece can be found here.
Copyright ©2013 The Hindu. This article may not be reproduced in its entirety without permission. A link to this URL, instead, would be appreciated.
karbarak
September 6, 2013
Glad to see the love for BDP. Post Mission Impossible the films havent been great, but the moments have. Some searching to figure out this term, something that he used often http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_focus#Split-focus_diopter
LikeLike
Hithesh
September 6, 2013
An A-grade B-movie director indeed. I’ve always found his movies to be very stylish. Glad to see such love for De Palma 🙂
LikeLike
Adarsh
September 6, 2013
Thank you for writing about DePalma! But have you watched Passion? I dont think he has still been able to get Hitchcock out of his system. 😀
LikeLike
Aditya Kashyap
September 6, 2013
Hi Brangan, I Know that this is totally out of context, But could you review this Kannada Movie Named Lucia? It’s a crowd funded movie and as far as the word of mouth is going, looks like its going to get a cult status pretty time soon.
LikeLike
Nidhi
September 7, 2013
BR, are you going to review Shudh Desi Romance?
LikeLike
Sam
September 7, 2013
Depending on the day of the week, De Palma is my favorite director. I quite enjoyed Passion despite it barely being a movie. I suspect that if De Palma could get the financing, he would make silent movies, just visuals and music, and I think if he did that then critics would be more open to his work. If you look at Passion as a thriller, it is lousy, but I I look at it more as an opera set in the world of trashy thrillers.
Although Rottentomatoes does indicate Mission Impossible as a turning point, I think that may be because the films since then have more reviews listed on there. I was under the impression that many of his early films were poorly reviewed, and I know he was routinely nominated for Razzies. Also, some of his earlier films like Dressed to Kill are similar to the kinds of genre exercises he makes today, so I don’t think there is a huge change in his work. I do miss his films that actually had good scripts though, but anything he does is a treat.
I’ve always had the dream of De Palma making a Bollywood film. He’d be perfect for an operatic masala potboiler that gives the audience a little of everything and is more about style and individual set pieces than story, character, or logic. Thoughts? Who do we have to contact to make this happen?! Imagine Brian De Palma’s Race 3!
LikeLike
SHIKHAR BHARADWAJ
September 7, 2013
CARRIE is his best work according to me.
LikeLike
saurabh
September 7, 2013
De Palma’s Mission Impossible is the best in the franchise. It is faithful to the tone of the original series (except turning Jim Phelps into the villain). The ones that followed became more of Bond derivatives with tonnes of action, lesser espionage elements and some Tom and Jerry music by Michael Giacchino.
LikeLike
venkatesh
September 7, 2013
Brian De Palma is a higher-budget Zalman King , not that there is anything wrong with it.
LikeLike
kbfan
September 7, 2013
Revisited Dressed to Kill a few weeks back on a whim. (Spoiler alert)The museum sequence which serves as the foreplay for the adultery/unprotected sex committed later on and the consequences faced by the lead character leading to her death is his most fascinating 15 minutes (of fame). The museum scene is on Youtube I think, worth a watch…(and there is something about NY in the 70s and early 80s that makes any movie set in NY watchable for me)
LikeLike
Raj Balakrishnan
September 7, 2013
Thank you for this wonderful piece on Brian De Palma. Fell in love with his Untouchables when I first saw it back in ’89. Have liked his other works dressed to kill, mission impossible and femme fatale. The sequence at the Cannes film festival, in femme fatale, was amazing. But his latest work passion, was poor. Have seen the original French version too, that at least had better looking leading ladies.
LikeLike
MANK
September 8, 2013
Great writeup about BDP .He is one of my favorite directors and i tend to watch his films irrespective of its critic rating. but he has always been making these strange personal films . he has always alternated personal films with big studio films .Dressed to kill after Carrie, Body double after Scarface. Casualities of war after the untouchables. Raising Cain after Carlito’s way . The big studio films stopped after the massive failure of Mission to mars. So after that he has been force to make only independent films like Black Dahlia,Femme fatale and now Passion. I think his greatest film is Blow out . It is such a great experience watching it again and again. The scene where john travolta pieces together the accident piece by piece using photographs and sound recording is perhaps the greatest scene ever shot in motion pictures. I was quite surprised you did not mention that in your article. AS for the great tracking shot in the museum in dressed to kill, I think it comes only a second to the climax in Carlito’s way where the camera chases Pacino all the way from his club to the the train to the train station and to his death .As for passion i agree with Raj Balakrishnan that it is a rather poor work and the leading ladies could have been better.Perhaps his limited budget did not permit him to hire top actors. But it is worth a watch for the typical BDP bravura touches.
LikeLike
brangan
September 9, 2013
Adarsh: No, haven’t watched “Passion.”
Aditya Kashyap: They played “Lucia” in a morning show on three days over this weekend here, but just wasn’t able to make it. Will look out for it.
Sam: That’s an excellent point about silent films. If only more desi filmmakers had that eye for the visual — we’d have a lot more fun at the movies.
Well, his earlier films were divisive too, but they had very passionate defenders among the major critics. Now though, that number has dwindled.
MANK: To add to what you say, he has always been making these “personal films.” Even his big studio films are very much his own. They’re not anonymous works. The reason I didn’t mention earlier films is because I wanted to focus on the latter part of his career, as stated in the first para here… Phase 2 of a filmmaker and all that.
LikeLike
Sam
September 12, 2013
Please see Lucia, Baddy. It is a brilliant experiment. The concept is based on the Spanish classic ‘Abre los ojos’ (or if you prefer, the Cameron Crowe turd- ‘Vanilla Sky’). My only gripe with the movie was the ending, where all the knots are neatly tied up and the whole movie is explained to us, rather than a much more ambiguous ending.
LikeLike