Brian De Palma's formal obsession with allusions to seeing and sightlessness have forever brought to mind the works of Dario Argento, perhaps the only other living director who can create and sustain the kind of delirious artifice on fierce display in Femme Fatale. While its Cannes Film Festival sequence must count as one of the most impressive set pieces ever mounted by a director, it is the film's opening long shot that deserves special mention. Laure Ash (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos) watches Double Indemnity on French television, studying Barbara Stanwyck and rewriting herself as a modern femme fatale. She and a group of thugs break into the Cannes Palais, hoping to swipe a fortune in diamonds from Regis Wargnier's whorish girlfriend Veronica (Rie Rasmussen). Wargnier's hideous East-West plays to the crowd while Laure and Veronica make out in the femmes bathroom.

Though De Palma's latest cinematic thesis may pale in comparison to both his own Body Double and Argento's Tenebre (the giallo director's audacious defense of auteur theory and possibly the best film De Palma never made), the remarkable use of water imagery throughout Femme Fatale welcomes a Jungian analysis and beckons comparisons to Argento's Trauma. Seven years after betraying her cohorts in crime, Laure returns to Paris a new woman (literally and figuratively) and married to an American ambassador (Peter Coyote). De Palma is a master of signs. While the Déjà Vue 2008 poster that decorates a telephone booth outside Nicolas Bardo's (Antonio Banderas) apartment may seem like a simple wink to the audience, the use of John Everett Millais's "Ophelia" as cover art for the poster evokes Laure's trouble with water. (In Trauma and Argento upstart Chang Youn-hyun's Tell Me Soemthing, the Millais painting is used for similar effect.)

Laure packs a gun and a one-liner or two, challenging the way men perceive women and using that perception to consume and spit out her men. De Palma remarkably superimposes Romijn-Stamos's face over that of the film's many women (Stanwyck during the film's opening shot and Mellais's Ophelia when Laure chit chats with Nicolas over cold espresso), at once reinforcing the nature of the character's split self and the overall dreamlike momentum of the narrative. There's an overwhelming sense here that the past is looking forward into the present and any given move can forever change the way of things. De Palma's formal fixation with multiple dualities is so precise and pervasive that it can be read into any given aspect of this elaborate puzzle of a film: Banderas and the silent Frenchman who "watch" Romijn-Stamos as she seduces them with the power of her sex; the dash that separates East from West in the title of Wagnier's water-logged film; and a larger more personal conflict between the U.S. and France.

De Palma has made remarkable use of split-screen before (perhaps most prominently in his masterpiece Sisters) though his use of the technique in Femme Fatale deserves special mention because of its riveting self-reflexivity. Nicolas came to Paris in order to reinvent himself. A washed up paparazzo, he has nothing to photograph but the church plaza across the street from his apartment. The collage he creates on the walls of his apartment represents his ongoing struggle to reinvent reality and his search for a divine moment. While De Palma continues to engage tropes used by Hitchcock and Argento before him, the intellectualism, experimentalism and overall delirium with which he teases and attacks these tropes is remarkable to behold in Femme Fatale. Nicolas's struggle is then that of De Palma's himself. Laure gives Nicolas his divine moment and Femme Fatale gives De Palma his.