Passion

Disappointed and I was warned. I really hoped I will be different and I will like it or at least it won't be as bad as it was described by viewers. Unfortunately I was completely wrong. it was bad. If the beginning was creating some kind of intrigue then the end was a mess. Idea was good but still after watching this, all around me in the cinema I could hear one big summary about the movie - WTF? I really loved main characters and even main actors - even Noomi who received some viewer critique but I wished this movie to be just better.It wasn't. I gave 3 but actually it is a big bonus. In the first moment after watching this movie I would five it 2 or even 1.

I've always been annoyed with Brian De Palma, because he so blatantly plagiarized Hitchcock, without ever developing a style of his own that could survive without constantly borrowing from the master. Nonetheless, De Palma did direct some decent movies, my favorites being Dressed to Kill, Body Double and Scarface. Be that as it may, his recent efforts (Femme Fatale, Passion) were so shamelessly bad, that I will have to watch closer to make sure I do not run into one of his mongrels again. I could not watch Passion to the end, it was just too much. I'll be brief: Direction: sloppy, disinterested, too linear Camera: cheap, TV-ish Acting: appalling, especially Rapace is shockingly bad, robotic and not believable Story: run-of-the-mill B-movie

Terrible movie. Cant believe how bad this was. Its very rare that I leave the cinema mid way through a movie but for this I willingly made an exception. The acting was really bad, the script was horrendous, really bad! I only joined IMDb.com so that I can write a review of this movie - thats how bad this movie was! I thought that there was a very disappointing performance from Noomi, I thought she would be better. I thought Paul Anderson was also completely bad too and his name deserves a special mention for how awful his performance was. Some completely ridiculous bits in the movie which beggars belief as to how it was accomplished. Such a pity that Brian De Palma was involved in this movie, I'm sure there was lots of squirming at the premiere when it became apparent how bad this movie actually was...

"Are you kidding me?" "is this a joke?" these were the questions I asked to writers, producer, director and actors who involved in this movie as well as to the critics who gave high ratings to it. Bad scenario, bad acting (excluding Rachel McAdams). This movie reminded me of the movie Room in Rome which also tried so hard make a terrible scenario to look attractive with girl to girl action. I'm not a movie critic or somebody who can understand from cinematography etc. I'm just a keen movie watcher who watches average of 60 movies a year. According to me this is a terrible movie and feel like this is my responsibility to warn people not to waste their time and movie to watch a beyond mediocre movie.

Even the aesthete should take a training course. Written and directed by a movie maestro, his new opus has become what movies have become today: totally cut from the reality and the people! If it's about a sexual harassment at work, I wonder if the people involved in this movie have really worked one single day: the firm is making thousand selling ideas, they had great trips to London, NYC, meet clients in party, work in their expensive flat and everybody is having sex with everybody, boss or employee, man or woman. Well, this background is so absurd and unbelievable that I couldn't care for the characters. And what about them? Except Noomi, all the cast is a failure: McAdams isn't convincing as a slutty boss and the rest is transparent. Worse, their motivations are totally dumb: if every time an employee has a disagreement, it leads to a murder, well, it will be know so far. The investigation is totally crap as I can't tell what have happened: anybody can explain me the final shoot? And as Lynch failed with "Mulholland", the lesbianism is again a boy candy: no emotion, no feelings, just a fantasy! What's left? De Palma offers a few psychotic moment with dark light and plays well with all the screens that modern technology offers: phones, TV, camera, computer... And, Noomi, of course: frankly, she is really the best actress nowadays. Like the pantheon, she is a chameleon and seems to reinvent herself in each movie. Here, she looks a bit like a Vulcan and can always show the whole scale of her emotions: happy, sad, crazy, afraid, fragile. As it was a disappointment, i wonder what the French original movie looks like because usually, french cinema is far worst !

I saw this film at the Ghent filmfestival 2012, as part of the official closing event. Expectations rise high when festival programmers deem this film worthy material to serve as a starter for such an occasion. It has to be excellent, or at least controversial, to work as a conversation piece during the inevitable reception party after the screening. Also, this director has a track record in thrillers to keep up. All of that said, a disappointment can materialize easily, be it due to festival fatigue (seen 40 films in 12 days), or just an ambitious but failed product, or a director trusting too much on his routine, or all the above combined. Whatever the cause of my disappointment, I refrained from my initial temptation to score a 1 (lowest) for the audience award when leaving the theater, and made it a 2 to compensate for a few (but not many) things that struck me as bright ideas. My first problem lies in the scenario, letting us wait half an hour for an interesting plot coming along in the form of a fraud scheme that was about to be unveiled. That extra story line was needed badly at that point. It gave others than the two main woman characters a reason for having an active role in the events that followed, other than just being entourage. Prior to that, we saw an ambitious woman (Christine), relatively high in the food chain, claiming to be the author of a successful ad that in fact was created by her subordinate (Isabelle). Of course, I don't want to defend such impeccable behavior, but it happens on a daily basis in the corporate world. You can accept it a few times as a fact of life, or decide it happened too often and that the time has come to move on and leave. Neither is it serious plot material that Isabelle gets laid by Christine's lover, nor Christine's sexual habits, nor her collection of sex toys. A more interesting twist, however, was the story that Christine told about her identical twin sister. She considers herself the cause of her premature death in a traffic accident. She says that the dreadful event still haunts her. Others insist that the twin sister is invented as an excuse for her wrongdoings. An indirect "proof" that the twin sister, imaginary or not, has some very special role in Christine's mind, can be derived from the mask that looks exactly like her, and that her lover has to wear while having sex. My second problem with the scenario is that the tension dropped to zero more than once. That should not happen in a film marked "thriller", created by an experienced director with a track record in this line of work. We are not sufficiently compensated with the turmoil of things that happen in the last half hour, all of which was far too condensed for the average viewer (like me) to dutifully absorb and thus appreciate. With some more attention for how to entertain the audience, I think that the scenes deserved some rearrangement, in order to spread the events better over the allotted time. The announcement in the festival brochure labeled this film as an "erotic thriller" (see WikiPedia for a definition and a list of notable examples). Indeed, we observe a lot of things happening that bear some relationship or other with sex, love, erotic plays, even all of those mixed together. But can either one of these be construed as a driving force in the dramatic events we see?? Maybe only one at the end of the film (no details here, to prevent spoilers). But the rest comes down to competition on a business level, in other words: survival of the fittest. I can go on and point out some other things I did not like about this film. But I don't think it adds very much to above description of my viewer experience. This is certainly not a masterpiece, and we know the director can do much better.

Have you ever wondered how it is possible to identify a rubbishy movie within the first 20 seconds of dialog? It is simply amazing how fast a crap script writer can get fatuous nauseating inane notions across in such a short time; something that should surely be speculated upon in film schools during the first semester. And we sure have one here: silly spite, pointless rejoinders, phony regrets, token-lesbianism, sleazy egoism; all in one pointless, plot less string of malicious banalities that makes melodramatic 50s B movies look like literary fiction. Have you ever wondered why, even when given a million dollar budget, movie makers will waste such an opportunity on a string of clichés and bland story development that would embarrass your thirteen-year-old daughter and bore your cat? It is surely a wonder. And a wonder that movie audiences would put up with such drivel and not walk out. Well, I did. And it took me an hour to recover my composure.

Saw this one at the Toronto International Film Festival, it's a cross between a late night made for cable movie and a European art film. The cinematography is great, lots of inventive shots. Actually, nearly every shot is a winner. The musical score can Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace ham it up as back stabbing mind f*cking executives. They have great chemistry and as the plot twists along we are never quite sure who to root for. Rachel McAdams' Christine basically plays a grown up version of Regina George from Mean Girls. None of it is meant to be taken too seriously. The Anyone who liked Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction or De Palma's own Dressed to Kill will be into this movie.

DePalma's first film in five years is purely for the fans, a throwback to his sensual thrillers of old; Sisters, Obsession, Dressed to Kill. So right off the bat, this probably excludes the majority of casual viewers who will find this too messy and too illogical to be of substance. Younger viewers who simply pick this off a website, will probably see the visual tricks he pulls as weird, lame stabs on ordinary technique. The problem is that DePalma has not changed as a filmmaker, it's the film norm that has absorbed and extended so much visual language that was considered somewhat radical in his time, so when Tony Scott films are marketed as ordinary action, of course he'll seem far less sophisticated. Same thing happened with Hitchcock near the end, when guys like DePalma where coming out. But oh what sweet, sweet DePalmaesque inanity this is! What DePalma is saying is always in the camera. He seems to say: this is a movie, the result of illusory placement of the eye, so why not go wild on placement? Also: the eye, by its very nature, causes narrative dislocation. He is intelligent, not in what the dislocations mean but in the fact they are shown to be at work, which now and then fool as depth in just the same way they fool the characters. You'll see all sorts of fooling the eye here. The car crash in the company garage, first filmed as dramatic with lachrymose piano cues and the second time as comedy. Scenes filmed with dutch angles and unusual shadows to register as dream but they are real. A split-screen that lies about its timeline. A scene set-up to be viewed as hallucinative dream but it's a flash back. And later we know it was an untrusted narration. Many others will make a more streamlined, more exciting thriller, but no one is so committed to expose cinematic illusion like DePalma. He doesn't hit deep, because the illusion is not wrapped around character but around plot, that is always the tradeoff with him. A tradeoff I am willing to make, because I can find more introspective filmmakers elsewhere. There is Wong Kar Wai, Shunji Iwai. Lynch, who brings illusion alive. But then you have an ending like this. It is utterly nonsensical as story, but the narrator has fooled us so much we'll fool ourselves thinking it's more than madness.

Advertising execs stab each other in the back over their careers and a an average looking cockney scrub in this mediocre pantomime thriller. Rachel Mcadams is given the opportunity to prove she is more than just a rom-com princess in the role of the manipulative boss lady to Noomi Rapace's Ad campaign creator, an opportunity she squanders. It's not entirely her fault though with such a terrible script to work with there wasn't a lot she could do. Noomi Rapace is dreadful, for me she hasn't yet been convincing in an English language role and she is just either wooden or over the top in this. The plot twists are visible with your eyes closed and nothing will be a surprise. The only thing that kept me watching were the laughs and this isn't a comedy. Some of the dialogue is so stupid I just kept feeling my jaw drop. When Rachel Mcadams tells a tragic story from her characters childhood and her and Noomi Rapace are just sat there sobbing it actually made me laugh because the acting was so terrible and the words they were saying were so poorly written. Add to this the amount of times you get one of those suddenly waking up from a dream moments (a cheap movie trick thats overused) that the film becomes a bit of a mess. So much of this is poor even down to the add campaign that triggers the war between these two women. Their clients are in such raptures over this dreadful idea that it's ridiculous. Also the rough looking guy they chose to play the love interest adds another comedy element to it. Why would these two attractive successful women be tearing each other apart over this guy? I'm sure I read on some of the advertising that this was supposed to be an erotic thriller. There were no erotic moments in this film anywhere. I think someone pulled a * out a drawer at some point and there was a lesbian smooch thats all the eroticism you get I'm afraid. I can't believe this was directed by De Palma. I have enjoyed many of his films in the past and I hope this is just a blip and not the shape of the things to come