Passion (2012) is (so far) Brian De Palma’s last theatrical release. It harks back to many of his obsessive themes—twins, doubling, intense female/female relationships, and movie making. It’s also strikingly, and self-consciously up-to-date in its fascination with the new technology of cell phone cameras and cell phone videos.
The film’s about two advertising executives in Germany; American Christine (Rachel McAdams) and her mentee, Isabelle (Noomi Rapace). The two are working on creating an ad for cell phones. Isabelle comes up with an innovative campaign; she has her assistant Dani (Karoline Herfurth) wear very tight jeans, put the phone in the back pocket with the camera on, and then walk around town to record whoever stares at her rear, in curiosity or lust.
The video’s a big success with the higher-ups—and Christine takes all the credit. The jealousy and animosity between the two women is exacerbated by the fact that Isabelle is sleeping with Christine’s boyfriend Dirk (Paul Anderson). After Christine humiliates Isabelle—first with a private showing of a video with her in bed with Dirk, then a public showing of Isabelle crashing her care in a parking lot—Isabelle spirals into a pill-fueled nervous breakdown. When she’s accused of murdering Christine with a knife, even she’s not sure if she did it. (Or so it seems…)
As the plot summary suggests, the movie is driven by a series of videos. First there’s Isabelle’s advertising campaign, then Christine’s cruel videos of Isabelle, and in the end a series of videos by Dani showing Isabelle committing murder. Dani uses these to force Isabelle to sleep with her.
Movies of De Palma’s New Hollywood era were supposed to be carefully crafted, individual visions—the director controlled the camera, the gaze, the world. But in Passion, vision is doubled, tripled, and multiplied. De Palma’s characteristic split screen becomes a metaphor for a universe in which everyone has a camera and trying to become the director of their own film.
Because it’s De Palma, all those films are more or less Hitchcock films, which means that they are all sadistic fantasies of control which manipulate violence and desire. Isabelle’s advertisement turns the traditional male gaze inside out, men still look, but the look has become the object of the female body—and specifically of the female rear. Christine and Dani both use film to manipulate Isabelle, though there too the typical Hitchcockian dynamic is scrambled, as Isabelle refuses to let the camera turn her into a victim, and instead becomes a victimizer, murdering the various women who want to control her with the camera and the gaze.
Creating a multiple movie for the multiple camera age of the cell phone is an extremely clever, and extremely De Palma, idea. It’s fun and satisfying to see each of these women put herself in that director’s chair, picking up that signature gaze, signature knife and signature cold control before twisting them all around into new narratives, new desires, and new butt cameras. I’d love to say that Passion is an underappreciated masterpiece—a triumphant demonstration that De Palma was still exploring new possibilities of moviemaking and new, weird byways of his own odd and bifurcated vision.
Unfortunately, the movie never gets there. De Palma isn’t willing to embrace the found footage aesthetic that his themes seem to call for; there are only glimpses of the cell-phone eye gaze before De Palma rushes back to his standard, beautiful, meticulously composed frames. The movie’s ending attempts to be multiple endings at once, a dream within a dream or a vision within a vision. But instead of the tour de force De Palma seems to be hoping for, it’s just a mess. It's neither scary not profound nor interesting; it just stutters and shrugs and peters out.
Instead of a capstone to a great career, Passion is an interesting, ambitious, bracing effort that’s ultimately a failure. Which is a fitting end to De Palma’s odd, frustrating, beautifully flawed career.