The Blonde Ambition

Brian De Palma's "Passion" had comeback written all over it. When movie audiences last saw the director of such classics as "Blow Out" and "Phantom of the Paradise," he'd strayed outside his usual horror-suspense comfort zone with "Redacted," a "Casualties of War"-ish found footage movie about Iraqi war atrocities that was well-intentioned but muddled. "Passion," in contrast, had all the makings of a return to form: seedy source material, sexy female stars, vengeful co-workers in a tale of rivalry and, y'know, passion. Even the title of the movie it's based on -- "Love Crime" by French director Alain Corneau -- screams De Palma. "Love Crime" could be the name of almost every single film he's ever made.

Alas, the critics' comments about "Passion" at the Venice Film Festival were generally more "go away" than "come back," and the reviews range from middling to disappointed to downright disgusted. That lower end of the spectrum is where you'll find Guy Lodge who gave the film a D+ at HitFix . It's not just bad, he claims, it's totally lifeless. Flat, ugly, with two very miscast leads in Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace, Lodge found very little to praise, much less feel passionate about. "Were De Palma’s name not on the thing," he writes, "you’d assume it was the work of a genre journeyman with a hard-on for "Dressed to Kill.'"

Lodge's review is the most strongly negative published so far, but just about every article strikes similar notes of frustration. In The Hollywood Reporter , Neil Young calls "Passion" "disappointingly anemic," taking De Palma to task for his heavy-handed choices in the realms of screenwriting, lighting, camera angles, and score. Though he admired De Palma's latest use of his signature splitscreen technique, he was generally underwhelmed by the filmmaker's nods to his past work, writing that "the impression is that De Palma is indulging himself with homages to his own Hitchcockian greatest hits, with results that veer close to self-parody on occasion and emphasize just how far this once-outstanding director's creative star has plummeted."

Fittingly for a festival where about half the titles in the official competition had religious themes, the 69th Venice Film Festival awarded its top prize, the Golden Lion, to “Pieta”, a mother-and-son drama with a sadistic streak from the prolific Korean director Kim Ki-duk. The film sharply divided critics — as do most of Mr. Kim’s confrontational movies — but it was deemed the best of the 18 competors by a jury led by the filmmaker Michael Mann. Other members of the jury included the actress Samantha Morton, the filmmakers Matteo Garrone and Pablo Trapero and the artist Marina Abramovic.