Currently playing on VOD platforms
MPAA Rating: R
Director: Brian De Palma
Film Pulse Score: 1/10
If Brian De Palma’s Passion happened to be a made-for-TV erotic thriller released in, say, 1993 or 1994 this film could be considered an achievement…in a sense. However, it’s 2013 and De Palma is asking you to pay hard-earned money in order to experience this so-called erotica thriller, which is apparently a synonym for travesty. An erotic thriller that contains a minuscule amount of events in which one would find themselves using the descriptor thrilling and an even smaller amount of actions that could be categorized into erotic and/or erotica.
Passion centers around the bitter rivalry between two employees of an advertising agency – the idea woman, Isabelle (Noomi Rapace) and her boss Christine (Rachel McAdams). The birth of the rivalry stems from Christine taking the credit for a new and exciting ad campaign that was entirely Isabelle’s creation, but it might have started earlier than that. “It’s not backstabbing, it’s just business” is what Christine tells Isabelle, in an attempt to justify her actions and the delivery of this line also marks the start of an escalating game of backstabbing one-upmanship that inevitably leads to murder. The most perfect murder.
If by perfect you mean the most telegraphed and overly melodramatic murder?…then yes, yes it is.
I feel I should start with the positives before I dive into the negatives of De Palma’s latest effort. There are none. I honestly racked my brain after the film looking for something, anything of worth or substance to commend, but I came up empty.
On to the negatives of which there are many, but I’ll try to keep it relatively short because we all have things to do. The most exasperating aspect of Passion has to be the irritatingly over-communicative score from Pino Donaggio, bursting at the seams with tension-indicating violins, Kenny G-style soft-core porn saxophone and a number of other instruments being played to the worst of their potential. While the film score is, itself, over-communicative the camerawork is its twin sibling – driving the point home just in case the viewer doesn’t fully comprehend the feelings they should be experiencing at any given moment.
The cinematography from José Luis Alcaine is the second most exasperating aspect of Passion, with its dull framing and frivolous slanting camera angles. For the majority of the film the cinematography is just bland and uninspired, that it until…the magnum opus marriage of poor cinematography and ridiculous editing occurs in split-screen. It starts with Christine anxiously looking forward towards a shower, while a shot of the ballet performance Isabelle is currently attending slowly pushes Christine’s shot to the right. The two play simultaneously for entirely too long (as if it were a joke); Christine, giddy with excitement at the anticipation of sex on the right portion of the screen and the male and female ballet dancers performing on the left portion of the screen. An abomination is what one would label this cinematic occurrence.
The third, and final (not entirely, but again…we all have things to do), exasperating aspect of the film has to be the twists and turns of the narrative. Which happen to be of the most lazy variety, that of – the dream. Nothing screams lazy and archaic like a character waking in fright from a bad dream (but is it?), but incorporate this spiritless plot device numerous times throughout the film feels like a slap in the face. To make matters worse, De Palma goes on to incorporate another, more offensive plot device – he takes the viewer’s hand and slowly walks them through an explanation of what transpired, but this time through (even more laughable) cell phone camerawork; he obviously feels his thriller is much more clever than he realizes.
Maybe De Palma wanted Passion to have the look and feel of an erotic thriller from the 90s and if he did – he succeeded; however, that still does not excuse the fact that the film is terrible in every way, shape and form. Furthermore, it stands to reason that, not only, was the film and every aspect of the film terrible, but also De Palma’s intentions were, they themselves, terrible. Passion stands as a snapshot of cinematic failure…in all departments.
