Passion

Brian De Palma – 2013 – Germany

Love him or hate him, you have to admire 72-year-old Brian De Palma’s unflagging disregard for critical gripes and political correctness.  In interviews he will make some effort to explain his philosophy and ideas, but not for long; eventually he falls back to his bottom-line position that his only real obligation as a filmmaker is to do what he feels like doing, not to twist movies into heart-warming social propaganda that activists will deem acceptable for mass consumption.  I happen to have always loved De Palma’s movies – even some of the lesser and maligned ones like Snake Eyes (1998) and The Black Dahlia (2006) – not because of their adeptness as thrillers or melodramas, but because of the sheer love for film itself that De Palma shares.  This is why he is a real auteur; while middle-brow journeyman are happy to collect prizes for preaching about the evils of racism, fast food, and whatnot, De Palma asserts with authority that artistic success hinges on the extent to which the creator communicates his feelings to his audience through his materials, not just his content.  De Palma’s mesmerizingly complex set-pieces comprised of slow-motion and split-screens and lucid dreams are exactly the cinematic equivalent of texture in a painting or the timbre of a Stradivarius; the “stuff” (as Francis Ford Coppola puts it) that the thing is made of are part of its aesthetic, not just what it may or may not be advocating.  In any case, Passion is De Palma firmly in fun-mode as he was for Raising Cain (1992), making an often hilariously lurid plot into a loose framework to pile on all the accoutrements we think of as De Palma-esque.  A description of the story would sound like an episode of Melrose Place, so I won’t bother.  It’s about revenge, identity crisis and mental illness; you know, the usual stuff.  The “passion” of the title does not belong to any of the characters; it belongs to De Palma himself with regard to his feelings about the maddeningly endless possibilities of film through basic tools like the angles, cutting, speed and duration of shots.