Passion Fruits

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Not that I'm prone to even considering such things, but it is quite literally impossible whether you're prone so or not to hate a scene that ends with Rachel McAdams, in nothing but a silky teddy-type boudoir get-up with a similarly shimmering robe billowed out about her half-nakedness, laid ever so precisely to maximize the drama, tossing a cell phone across the room while screaming curses at it. That moment involves a foiled booty-call our executive temptress had been trying to finagle, and "foiled booty-call" could be this movie's tag-line, for better and for worse (mostly better). 

Director Brian DePalma is having tons of fun with Passion, his latest rummage through the Skinemax trash-heap of giallo and soap operas (it's a remake of the 2012 French thriller Love Crime starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier), and for a lot of the run-time it shows. If it never quite reaches the dizzying spellbound heights slash lurid lows of his classics in this vein - it's no Body Double or Dressed To Kill - it's still has an awful lot of bug-eyed lustful fun trying. What other director can purposefully twist a sad story about a hit-and-run accident into a sick laugh-out-loud winking punchline and set-up for eventual shenanigans with such taste-abandoning glee?

McAdams specifically is having a ball; she swoops around in her billion dollar wardrobe with matching whore lips, panting lasciviously at the thought of business transactions and strap-ons with the same dedicated brand of wicked minx ambition. If I'm still unsold on Noomi Rapace, then perhaps this is my problem with the film as a whole altogether - I just can't warm to her, and the film needed somebody I cared about more in the part. Still DePalma's camera is a fucking thing of beauty - a thing of beauty fucking - the film's first ultimate climax (of what will be like five), trotting out his old friend the split screen, is cinema distilled to its awesome delirious essence. Bizarre, pointless, and entirely indispensable. The contradictions, the friction of them, they are the fun.

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