Passion

by Stefan Dobroiu

VENICE FILM FESTIVAL: Five years after his war drama Redacted was screened in the Venice Film Festival competition, Brian De Palma comes back on the Lido with an entirely different film: set in the very competitive world of advertising, Passion tells a story of ambition, lust, duplicity and dangerous games.

Based on Alain Corneau's Crime d'amour, but adapted (or redacted?) to suit De Palma's favourite topics, Passion focuses on Christine (Rachel McAdams) and Isabelle (Noomi Rapace), two young women working on an advertising campaign for a new mobile phone. They seem best friends and they even exchange a kiss in a car, but when Christine steals Isabella's idea and uses it to get promoted, their relationship shifts to darker and darker areas.

With McAdams, Rapace, a perhaps too hasty comparison with Basic Instinct and the promise of campy pleasure as efficient hooks, Passion might have international success, but De Palma's noir struggles to find the right tone and becomes involuntarily funny at times. The changes in pace and some easy choices in terms of scriptwriting might make the audience's attention wonder, while the eyes are drawn by Berlin architecture, sumptuous outfits and some interesting and striking choices in art direction.

McAdams and Rapace communicate well on screen, but much more interesting is Karoline Herfurth's Dani, Isabelle's assistant, who makes things go even further when she intervenes between the two protagonists. Unfortunately, things get so complicated (the director uses dream sequences to blur the already blurred reality even more) that they almost border on incoherent. When the story's final strike comes, the audience might be too tired to enjoy De Palma's biggest surprise.

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