Death of a Dream: On Brian De Palma's Domino (2019)

The question now is whether one can be both a genius and a failure. I believe, on the contrary, that failure is talent. . . . A film that succeeds, according to common wisdom, is one in which all the elements are equally balanced in a whole that merits the adjective “perfect.” Still, I assert that perfection and success are mean, indecent, immoral, and obscene. . . All great films are “failed.”

                                                        – François Truffaut, 1955

In the history of art late works are the catastrophes.

                                                        – Theodor Adorno, 1937                      

I

Let’s get the boring details out of the way: Domino’s production history is, yes, full of struggles and strife. First conceived circa 2014 without De Palma’s involvement, he comes on board in 2017 leading to filming in July and August of that year in a panoply of European countries – Denmark, Belgium, Spain, Italy. The source of the finances is just as diverse: a Danish-Spanish-Belgian-French-Dutch co-production, Domino’s existence is already spread thin and it’s continued existence is at the mercy of its financiers. This becomes clear when rumors of cancellation appear on set due to the withdrawal of a Belgian company from financing duties. Money is tight, funding uncertain, and De Palma, the artist caught in a web of unreliable patronage, is forced to spend most of his time waiting around in hotel rooms—when all is said and done he’s shot only 30 days out of 100. Working with what he has, the film is completed in 2018. At some point the film is sent to Thierry Fremaux for Cannes consideration without De Palma’s consent, non-mixed, non-graded, and without post-synchronization completed. He’s not happy. The floating discontent surrounding the film and its production leads to rumors that the final runtime of around an hour-and-a-half has been cut down from a length almost an hour longer, the classic producers-recut-the-director’s-masterpiece-and-butcher-it scenario. De Palma will later deny this in a terse statement given to the online De Palma news site De Palma a la Mod, saying, “It was not recut. I was not involved in the ADR [Automated Dialog Replacement], the musical recording sessions, the final mix or the color timing of the final print.” Not only will Domino fail to premiere at a prestigious film festival, but it will barely make it into theatres at all. The film is dumped unceremoniously onto VOD in spring 2019.

The temptation, for some, to doubt the film’s quality – based on these anecdotes alone – has already begun. I feel bad for them.

But lest we proceed with the false notion that De Palma has disowned Domino with his comments on the production, we simply have to hear what he says in an interview shortly after completing the film, with special attention paid to his last word on the subject:

You’ve just finished Domino, a film on terrorism, shot in Denmark, Belgium and Spain…

It was a horrible experience. The film was underfunded, it was far behind schedule, the producer kept lying to us and didn’t pay some of my collaborators. I don’t at all know if this film will be released.

But do you like it?

Yes, it’s good.[1]

II

But who cares what the filmmaker says, right? So let’s admit that Domino is a failure and go from there. If by the end it appears less a failure and more one of Truffaut’s great “failed” films, then I’ll have done my job.

Where does Domino sit in the history of cinema? Only De Palma’s second film of the decade, coming seven years after Passion—a film that was greeted, in the usual places, with a great deal of enthusiasm and interest—Domino is relegated off to the side, away from the main stage of film culture, a non-event, a curio, a footnote. Even Cahiers du cinéma, the magazine that’s passionately defended De Palma’s work since the early 80s[2], gives Domino naught but a single, small column in the DVD section back-pages in a review marked by the usual guarded dismissiveness (flawed, still of interest, etc.)—whereas Passion, just seven years earlier, the magazine had named movie of the month, awarded a full review, and included interviews with both De Palma and Pino Donaggio to boot. Here’s what seems to be the case: to mainstream film culture, De Palma is no longer a filmmaker of the highest stature. (Fitting, then, that Domino’s most shocking scene is a terrorist shooting on a film fest’s red carpet. Take that film culture.) Rather, having become a kind of Hollywood exile, like a Chaplin or Welles, De Palma contents himself with scrounging funds from an array of European producers to make his independent art. Failing to be screened at big festivals, Domino is shunted into the realm of VOD and left to rot, at the mercy of viewers to resurrect for themselves (or not).

And now here we are in 2020, a century and a quarter removed from cinema’s public beginnings, a moment in time when cinema has been forced to regress back into the private arena that it first emerged from around 1895. Domino, in 2019, anticipates what is to come the following year: no films premiering on the big screen, all either delayed or punted to the small screen. (It’s too soon to say whether the attempts spearheaded by Chris Nolan to change that will be entirely successful.) De Palma, having made clear that he paints for the canvas of the big screen, is boxed into the size of one’s TV, one’s laptop, one’s phone. The irony is double, as these are the very kind of objects which have always populated De Palma’s cinema and which he is fascinated by in their relation to images and image-making, the proliferation of images and what that means for our world. To watch Domino on one’s device in 2019, or in 2020 especially, is to experience a particular feeling and to exist in a particular place in cinema history (production-wise, distribution-wise, etc.) where one is alienated from film culture at large and exists solely within one’s own space, watching cinema alone, in one’s room (cinema has always been the loneliest art). A personal story: when I watched Domino for the first time, my laptop broke down mid-viewing and I was forced to finish watching it on my phone. I subsequently watched it again on my phone the next day. Make this into a metaphor for whatever you want, but I choose to read it as a sign that technology (or it’s failures) cannot diminish the experience of a film but only change it.

For the fact remains that I was incredibly moved by this film, this film that it seemed all others had disdained. Domino is a film maudit, the kind of “accursed film” which was originally held up as great by those crazy Frenchmen against the cinema of quality at the first Festival du film maudit in Biarritz, France 1949. It’s the kind of film that we would show today in our own film maudit festival amidst the likes of Eastwood’s The 15:17 to Paris and other films of its ilk, spiritually far-flung into the depths of profound art but commercially and critically derided. This would be a polemical act, as it was for those Frenchmen, and it would be beautiful. Perhaps, in an even more polemical spirit, this festival would take place entirely online, to prove once and for all that cinema is cinema no matter the size of the screen, to prove that the small screen is not lesser but simply different. In the case of Domino, a film composed for the big screen but forced to adapt to the small, everything becomes denser, and we are forced into a more intimate relationship with these images on which big ideas and big emotions are splayed out. It is, unintentionally, a film for the age of streaming, with a distribution story that serves as a metaphor for the transition in the history of film viewing from big screen to small. And it is, perhaps less unintentionally, an important film for this era of viewing, because it pushes us to reexamine our relationship to images and their consumption, not only ethically but metaphysically.

But Domino still feels small, if not actually then at least experientially. In almost every fashion it seems as though it should be nothing more than a footnote to De Palma’s career. For after Passion—a kind of summing up of De Palma’s cinema, a synthesis of everything he has done—what is left to do? That film had all the sensuality and schlock of De Palma’s most controversial early films like Dressed to Kill (1980), with all the European dream-mystery vibes of later films like Femme Fatale (2002). It was a kind of legacy work, one to cap it all off. Domino, then, appears unneeded, an afterthought, an eye-sore on the filmography, a work to be glanced at and forgotten for greater pleasures from the past. It is, therefore, a film at the end of cinema—the end of both De Palma’s career and, given the almost complete shutdown of film production at present, possibly the end of cinema worldwide.

This stranded film may indeed exist on an island within De Palma’s body of work, but if so it is an island of profound importance for the De Palma project, possibly a projection of where De Palma is heading with his art. The accidental nature of the lack of shooting days, or De Palma’s inability to oversee the final mixing and whatnot, can hardly wipe away what seems to me like a reasonably close facsimile of what De Palma originally intended to create, a film that was perhaps intended as a new step forward in his work—a step, perhaps, that goes beyond anything he’s ever done. Beyond in what direction? I have no idea. It is perhaps not beyond but deeper within his own artistic persona, so deep that it can only manifest itself on the surface in Domino’s austere images seemingly stripped of the usual ornamentation one is used to in De Palma. Next to something like Passion, Domino appears almost as post-cinema; compared to De Palma’s recent work it is disarmingly straight-forward, no narrative tricks à la Passion or Femme Fatale, no mystery between dream and reality or anything like that. It is instead bluntly barreling ahead and, I’d say, reaching for a new and deeper understanding of reality and the film image that captures it.

III

The fact is De Palma hasn’t made a movie in America since Mission to Mars at the turn of the millennium. He’s left Hollywood, but Hollywood hasn’t left him. De Palma’s cinema has always channeled the Dream Factory’s best qualities—the dark undercurrent of romanticism as well as the tenderness and violence that bubble to the surface in the best studio output—without falling into the traps of mediocre bourgeois commercial filmmaking. And ever since he’s left Hollywood for good those qualities have become more prevalent than ever. Unshackled from the actual system, he’s now free to roam the alleyways of Hollywood’s dark dreams undisturbed, swimming in the same pool of hidden desire and hopelessness that Vertigo and its ilk once emerged from (more on that film’s relevance later). In classic Hollywood there was always light and dark—but for De Palma there is only the dark half remaining, the light half of comedy and levity now only manifesting as bitter irony and sardonic humor. Femme Fatale, The Black Dahlia, and Passion are exhibits A, B, and C for De Palma’s cribbing of classic Hollywood themes and tropes, but pushed to their breaking point. These three works veritably represent the unbridled id of your average studio noir/thriller/etc. from back in the day.

So where does Domino fit in? It obviously calls back to the classic films of Hollywood and it’s genres, but it also surges forward into its own genre—I’ll call it the molasses thriller (until I hear a better suggestion). The weight of these things from past cinema, the darkness and romanticism alluded to above, is all there, but the images burst forth from tradition with a bluntness and sharpness that recalls more from modern DTV actioners than anything from Hollywood’s past. Two decades removed from working inside Hollywood and De Palma’s style has only gotten leaner, all the fat removed but still incredibly muscular. And when the Hollywood ghosts that haunt De Palma appear—for instance, in the scene of the two protagonists driving in southern Spain accompanied by Donaggio’s strings, recalling the Hermann-scored wanderings of Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo’s San Francisco—they appear with a force, a lushness, an icy romanticism that one senses but can’t feel; can’t feel because this bolt of sound and image from a distant era seems to contradict the modern setting and impoverished aesthetic of the film. But it’s not a juxtaposition so much as a mismatched aestheticism—you think to yourself that this content doesn’t deserve this treatment. But then you think: maybe it does. Maybe what’s special about Domino is that it takes B-level material and elevates it through pure & hard-headed filmmaking—elevates it not in the sense that “elevated horror” claims to elevate horror, but in the sense of making us realize that within the “low” material is buried something essential, and it’s taken this long—until De Palma, with his special talents—to bring it to the surface.

…

Relegated to a VOD release, torn in post-production from its director, Domino wears the marks of an atrophied budget. Anemic fight scenes, underwritten characters, and cutting limited by the low budget: pure B-movie therefore – which should not obscure the singularity. Like several of his aged colleagues, Lynch or Coppola, Brian De Palma finds himself exiled from the system and delivers works disconnected from dominant modes. Survival or freshness? For Domino also recalls the provocative beginnings of the filmmaker: irony and satire, the search for bad taste, indifference to plausibility, and plastic abstraction without concern for incarnation. Built on the favorite themes (voyeurism and responsibility of vengeance), the film gets its title from the political theory of dominos, and this demonstration of the interlacing of actions in the four corners of Europe moves the character-pawns like visions of the world: the well-named Christian (overlooked by explicit crucifixes in the prelude) embodies the conflict between duty and vengeance; Alex the path of retaliation; Lars the wear and resignation; Joe the political cynicism; the Libyan Ezra the tragedy of the outcast become assassin to save his family; and Al Din the terrorist director. To the denunciation of American interventionism, Domino adds the observation of the universal appropriation of the tics of the image by the Net, but opposes a politically incorrect vision of Islamic assassins and the radical otherness of cultures.

                                                        – Pierre Berthomieu[3]

Like late Welles it is a blast to see the magician exiled and operating with no means and still finding ways to arrive at new images (and, make no mistake, much of Domino feels refreshingly new.) . . . Like much of European Welles, Domino is exciting art povera; the lack of resources are glaring in a conventional sense but also open avenues of meaning and feeling. A masterclass of making much out of nothing. Just witness the long close-up whose lens movement not only enforces the scene’s dramatic point, but exposes the entire investigative logic of the film’s images and the mix between cinema and policing it is based on. . . . De Palma still stages all of Pearce’s scenes like he is the big Mabusian villain. His exit line “We’re Americans, we read your e-mails” remains hanging over the final scene, half DTV absurdity, half serious, the same way the movie itself has that De Palmian angry grin. One can never know for sure if it is a serious investigation of police and image-making or an excuse to have fun with it. Knowing our master of ceremonies, it’s probably both.

                                                            – Filipe Furtado[4]

Despite De Palma’s best efforts with lighting and art direction, the photography can’t shake off the bland clarity of much low-budget, digitally shot cinema. But as happens all too often with contemporary cinema, that’s mistaking the wrapping for the actual gift. Domino proves a galvanizing experience in regards to the current movie scene, as pure an auteurist artefact as any I’ve seen and one that, in its way, recalls many a late B movie excursion from the major talents of a much earlier filmmaking generation: Fritz Lang or Edgar G. Ulmer would have entirely understood Domino. . . . Domino has many of the qualities of old B-movies often wielded with careless gusto. The to-the-point narrative feels almost radical and certainly refreshing in its unfussy cohesion, the directness of its themes and characterisations. The revelation of Alex and Lars’ affair is offered not to implicate some mind-bending twist but to lend new volatility to the way character and plot interact.

                                                                – Roderick Heath

This is a second-tier, non-event film (a commendable rejuvenation for De Palma), and its brisk narrative moves as if on impulse. De Palma’s mastery of pace and composition makes the briefest image and sharpest edit count. When Christian confronts Ezra, their initial alarm is conveyed through European/African facial contrasts—film noir close-ups burning with sociological dread—that, thanks to cinematographer José Luis Alcaine, raise the movie’s temperature. Each character’s desperation and personal motivation are vivid; the global nightmare is conveyed with such quick efficiency that Domino plays like a B-movie dream of a great De Palma film.

                                                                   – Armond White

…

Domino: B-movie, genre film, spiritual cousin to the DTV film—i.e., leaning toward the trash heap, or so people think. “Quality” cinema this is not. Good—all the better for true lovers of cinema who don’t care if they’re called crazy for finding profundity in “low” works. What are we dealing with here? If one wishes to raise Domino to the level of art one must recognize the metaphysics of the B-movie. What is it but a playground for form, a test for the filmmaker to see if they can’t extract treasures from the most disreputable places? All the more so if the script is imposed rather than written from scratch. Mission: Impossible (1996) could by a key film in relation, a script and story and tradition handed to De Palma which he then must make something of—in other words, he must conquer it with form. In the same way that Mission: Impossible becomes a brilliant work that displays all that De Palma can offer, so too Domino. The style creates the substance. Thinking along these same lines, thinking about the crime thriller, the spy film—is there perhaps a relation to Hitchcock’s two late spy films, Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969)? There is perhaps the same poetics of bluntness as Torn Curtain, an austerity of form and sharpness of cut, with a deep sensuality of the image, its rhythms in tune both with the deepest emotions between characters and also the overarching tectonics of the political/intelligence world which the characters are trapped in and which they must navigate with tension and suspense. And like in Topaz, everyone up top has their own agenda, the shifting motives and crisscrossing goals creating a messy situations for the agents, at the end nobody goes home with what they want, and if they do it’s not with what they need.

IV   

Since I’ve accidentally slipped onto some Hitchcock comparisons, we might as well tackle that beast. We’ll let De Palma have the first word:

I don’t think I do referencing, I use ideas which I think are effective in this particular piece at the moment. If they’ve been used before, fine. I mean, who cares? To me, it’s all grammar. If I’ve got that word available and it was used before and if I can use it again more effectively for my piece – why not? It’s the history of art from the beginning of time. Why do you think painters still paint Chartres Cathedral? Do you think they should be painting some rock in a garden? But they have this incredible architectural thing in front of them! Are they copying, are they simulating it? Well, maybe they have a different interpretation of the piece of art that’s in front of them. I mean, how unusual…

Let’s go back a few years, all the way to 1958. A young Brian De Palma is living in New York and goes to see Vertigo first-run at Radio City Music Hall. This is the film that sends De Palma whirling off onto the path of becoming a cinematic visionary. Without Vertigo, I daresay De Palma’s cinema would not exist—it would, at the very least, be very different. His entire filmography is essentially a long, deep, complex answer to that one film. Sure, Rear Window and Psycho and dozens of other Hitchcock and non-Hitchcock titles have their claims to influencing De Palma’s cinema, but I’m not talking about surface similarities here—I’m talking about the swampy, melancholy, inner-crisis dream-realism that bubbles underneath most of Hitchcock’s work and veritably seeps out of Vertigo’s every pore. All of De Palma’s most De Palmian films (whatever that means) have this quality, and Domino, for all of its apparent blandness, is one of them.

The opening rooftop chase in Domino does, of course, recall the one at the beginning of Vertigo. But as an action scene, it has none of the snappiness or rhythm of your average thriller set piece. Rather, the scene is marked by a kind of banality, a kind of lurching awkwardness, it has a certain vigorousness to it but it’s totally impotent. It’s soaked in molasses, the characters moving across the rooftops and inching along the gutter at an unassured crawl rather than your usual semi-competent skill. It’s an old man’s scene. It has all the tell-tale signs of an action scene but with none of the juice. Incompetent filmmaking, or a filmic gesture of deep meaning? I think you know where I stand. Sixty years after De Palma first sees it in Vertigo he gives it back to us again, but this time filtered through a lifetime lived and a cinematic career had. Of course De Palma is going to return to Vertigo again and again—it was the film that sparked his cinematic dreaming, of course he’s going to keep dreaming it. But De Palma’s version of the dream is of course going to be different than Hitchcock’s. He lives in a different era. He’s seen things that Hitchcock could never have imagined. So Hitchcock has to be updated for the digital age, the endless 21st century, where motives are even less clear and the split between public and private has all but shattered. The existential terror that suffocates Hitchcock’s darkest masterworks is the norm now. And our world is familiar with this darkness in a most intimate way, tragically and now almost banally so. If we can say that De Palma has spent most of his career showing us what Hitchcock couldn’t, making Hitchcock’s subtext into his own text, then perhaps we can say that with Domino De Palma has moved beyond that and shown something that never even crossed Hitchcock’s mind.

V

De Palma filmed Domino just before his 77th birthday, and it was released before his 79th—the same age, just a little older, at which Hitchcock made his final film before his death. If this were to be his last, it would perhaps be a sign of great horror at the present state of the world that De Palma’s cinema ends on a terrorist attack and the image’s complicity therein, whereas Hitchcock’s cinema, with Family Plot (1976), ended on a joyful and moving wink to the audience. In the forty-plus years since, cinema’s place in the world has perhaps become no longer a game of entertainment but something which must deal with the very real depths of terror and sadness in the world.

…

You try to do the best you can but in the immortal words of William Wyler “Once your legs go it is time to hang up your riding crop” basically. It gets more difficult to make movies if you physically have limitations so if I get to make a couple more pictures, great, but as you are heading into 80, it becomes quite a challenge. 

                                                            – Brian De Palma, 2019

Scorsese has wondered before how many movies he has left. What’s your expectation?

I think we’re getting near the end here. I have a bad knee. William Wyler said when you can’t walk, it’s over with. Now, if you write these books, that can use up our creative imagination. But as long as I can do it, I will do it. But I’m not going to miss not doing it. (laughs)

                                                            – Brian De Palma, 2020

Domino, loose and endearing film, which must be seen as we watched the last Brisseaus, those increasingly broke films wherein we scrutinized how a filmmaker worthy of the name did with that, that poverty and that nudity.

                                                            – Camille Nevers[5]

It all has a last-stand feel, in which De Palma excoriates today’s regime of easy-to-make but disposable images, which people, now all spies, use to brutalize each other. Scene after scene features piles of red tomatoes, there for critics to throw at De Palma so they can be tabulated and scored by review aggregators.

                                                            – A.S. Hamrah

… 

So Domino is a late film, there is no doubt about that—late for De Palma’s career and maybe also for cinema itself. It is an old man’s film. This old age—it is something that all the great filmmakers (at least those who made it that far, or who were allowed to) have faced with a bravery undisturbed by any decrease in critical excitement or love. The list is longer than we realize because of the disregard for those late works which perhaps do not dazzle us as the earlier work did, or do not immediately strike us as having a greatness that the works did when the filmmaker was at their “peak.” These are works which surprise us as much as they move us, works that bear the spiritual markings of the late film without necessarily concerning themselves with what one might imagine a twilight work would concern itself with. Stripped bare, these films show us what is essential—to the filmmaker and to life. They do not hide behind showy plots or extravagant sets, but bare themselves simply and profoundly, their souls on their sleeves, vulnerable—and oh how we have abused that vulnerability, mistaking it for indifference or miscare.

Perhaps this isn’t the place to wax poetic on late films, on late style. On the works of art that reveal, to me, a secret knowledge of life and the world that can only come from a place deep inside our oldest and greatest artists. The kind of knowledge that, often hidden beneath convention or in seemingly uninteresting forms, can only be found by the one open to that knowledge, to the one prepared to find it, to the one who humbles themself in front of the artist. Is such a mindset a fallacy of über-auteurism, a placing of the artist in the role of a God who can do no wrong? No, it’s simply a way of reaching for edification that settles for nothing less than the maximum, even beyond what the film might “objectively” be able to offer. That someone like myself can receive so much edification from a film like Domino where others cannot—should I care whether they are right (and I honestly don’t think they are) when I am the one receiving more edification? But seriously (at the risk of descending into a harshness which I don’t intend)—if you consider De Palma a great filmmaker, that is, one who makes great films, how arrogant is it to assume that he has made something less than great? How insulting is it to him to think that his latest is bad, after a whole career of refining his skill and vision? Humble yourself and be open to the film, this is an elder speaking to us from a place of rare perspective. The most precious and rare truths are being communicated to us here—so shut up and listen!

With Domino De Palma has unfortunately been lost in a territory—due to the accidents of production trouble, and people’s natural attitudes toward filmmakers “past their prime”—where his artistry is even more likely to go unnoticed (which it already was, by many, even at his most visible). This is perhaps to be expected, a melancholy fact but a crucial one to most if not all late films—so it is the enthusiast who is edified by the film, not the one who has closed himself off to it at the slightest whiff of production trouble or failure of “proper” distribution. The one who is humbled in the presence of the great De Palma is on the contrary open to what is there, no matter where it is or how one accesses it. Listen—Hitchcock has been dead for forty years and his own late films, although vastly more appreciated now than at the time of their release, are still nowhere near being taken in as the full-blown late career masterworks that they are. On the surface, Domino appears to be an even less likely candidate for critical rejuvenation. When should we place our bets on? 100 years, 200? Who knows—but for the one who is vulnerable to what De Palma has offered us with Domino there is no wait.

VI    

Beheadings, cut throats, torn fingers: Domino classically follows the thread of spilt blood but the general principle of the cut runs also over other surfaces, less organic than inorganic these—the grey surfaces of a table of screens relaying surveillance videos to serve the psychological torture of the CIA and those of the video indexed on the split-screen technique used by the terrorists on the occasion of an attack carried out during a society party in Amsterdam. At this point, the wound is deep for the past master in the art of the split-screen and whose tweaks, from Dionysus in ’69 (1970) to Passion shot more than forty years after, would be fatally lacerated by the contemporary realities, complementary and mimetic, of the digitalization of psychological torture and of the digital circulation of terrorist videos. Brian De Palma has for a long time sought to show how the ideological promise of an “addition to seeing” [plus de voir] (Serge Daney) represents a strategy of the society of the spectacle to camouflage themselves by making illegible its domination by saturation and voyeurism. The split-screen can then expose the structural division of the gaze which always sees more and less than what is there to see, blinded by its lack as by its surplus. But the lessons learned from the split-screen wouldn’t weigh much more now in view of the exponential inflation of uses, of devices and of machinic arrangements, legal and illegal, which compete to fill the eyes by reducing, or even destroying the respective sensibility of filmed beings and of spectators, all devoted on both sides of the digitized membrane to a viral and wrongful indignity.

                                             – News from the Cinematographic Front[6]

Hence the constantly reiterated recourse to all the procedures of seeing, always as close as possible to a “truth” which is only given over time: gradual zoom, split-screen, slow motion, which all have the common possibility of expanding time, as much as the image. The issue stays the same: seeing long enough so as not to forget. And for the filmmaker, thus reducing the spectator to his simplest form, the one who all together hopes and remembers. De Palma therefore will have gone further than Hitchcock. He will have renounced elegance, to deploy all the available tools of his time, his own pornography. De Palma, he’s the filmmaker made a whore. With arguments. Above all it’s a heart which never ceases to beat over his filmography, as much a master of the thriller as an ace of melodrama. Of those who know the journey from image to tears, journey so slow that all our lives wouldn’t suffice to find the necessary time. Thus, it would be wrong to think that easy tears sacrifice the time they needed to manifest; they come from so far that they never announce themselves. De Palma knows this, even repeats it. All his shots are a part of the same infinite prayer for lost images.

                                                                – Sébastien Bénédict[7]

De Palma has always been a surveillance filmmaker, just as Hitchcock before him; both before it was a commonly known idea. In the 21st century now it’s known well-enough to see clearer than ever that De Palma has always been dealing with the danger of filming/being filmed, the potency of technology for good and evil, the end of privacy, and the power of public images. At this point De Palma’s camera even simulates the framing and motion of your average public security cam—just witness the scene, beautiful and ominous, of the slow zoom-in on Coster-Waldau’s gun leading up to his forgetting of it, foreshadowing the weight of this mistake for the rest of the narrative. It’s hands down one of the most brilliant formal maneuvers in recent memory. It’s just one example of many where De Palma’s formal rigor elevates the scene above what most other filmmakers would do with it. And it’s pure simplicity.

 

Another example of Domino’s casual virtuosity where form is concerned: the climactic scene of a thwarted terrorist attack at a bullfighting ring. Scored by another variation on Ravel’s Bolero (we’ve already heard Ryuichi Sakamoto’s version in the Femme Fatale heist scene), it’s a pretty literal demonstration of the musicality of De Palma’s style. It’s a ballet, really, De Palma the choreographer of sounds and images, and at every level of the mise-en-scène there is achieved a maximum of harmonic beauty and melodic clarity. It’s the director as composer and conductor—say the lighting is one instrument and the camera movement and editing another—each aspect of the mise-en-scène is treated as an instrument to be utilized and synthesized with the others, a total art form. The casual precision and beauty on display makes it look easy, but then why is De Palma the only one that seems capable of doing it?

…

Nobody wanted to give De Palma’s new, more-or-less direct-to-VOD thriller Domino credit as an auteur work, but the fact is that at least three or four of its sequences have the verve and invention of the director’s glory days, including the spectacular—and spectacularly incorrect—set piece depicting a terrorist attack on a European film festival, broadcast on a social media feed that shows the killer’s face side-by-side with the victims glimpsed through her weapon’s high-tech crosshairs. The result of De Palma’s visual gamesmanship is a multifaceted massacre scene that could just as easily be filed under exploitation as critique; by conflating different kinds of “shooting” (the camera and the gun) and reflecting the murderer’s gaze back at us twice over, Domino forces us to think about what we’re looking at instead of simply consuming it (even as the villains’ plans are explicitly to transform political violence into online entertainment). 

                                                                – Adam Nayman

… 

De Palma, in his struggle to produce meaningful images, essentially sits in the middle of the very two things that he fights against in this film: on the one side, Hollywood, with all it’s formal mediocrity and ideological tepidity, and on the other side, terrorism. Cinema is no longer neutral; it’s ease of access today means that it primarily exists as a tool for those two different forms of abuse and their offshoots, which must be fought against in order to produce images that prove the agenda of those two to be the evil that they are. For his whole career De Palma has been telling us: images are dangerous, images are powerful. But—and this is the paradox of De Palma’s career—images are also the very tool to be used against these dangers. De Palma’s images are his extension of empathy towards the world and the tragic situations that exist, towards the reality of dreams and the dream of realities, an aggressive and tragic empathy that drips off the screen, yearningly embracing everyone and everything whose sadness is true. De Palma’s cinema itself is the ultimate rebuttal to those who accuse it of cynicism, who accuse De Palma of “hating his characters.” A falser characterization could hardly exist. On the contrary his images embrace them, his camera loves them, De Palma’s tragic gaze and its expression in the mise-en-scène makes us care about them. In Domino, too. Accuse the film of being poorly written if you want, but who cares—writing has never made a character three-dimensional, it’s always been the camera. On the page they can only ever be two-dimensional, it’s the camera that creates the illusion of three that makes a character come alive. These kinds of criticisms are just another variation on the calculator-brain attitude of viewers who think about film appreciation as math equations. To be honest I find the dialogue hits like a load of bricks, but I’m not going to sit down with my calculator to figure out how much of that is due to the brutality and sensuality of De Palma’s images and how much is due to the innate qualities of the un-filmed script. It is what it is.

VII          

If his latest films (like the fascinating Passion) carry the trace of this fragility, let’s say material, they remain majestic, works of a still brilliant spirit, and deserve to be reevaluated. But in reality it’s the whole filmography that’s vital to ingest, and to digest. For among the filmmakers of his generation, he is without a doubt the one which has carried the aesthetic requirement highest, the one for whom the cinema, apart from all other consideration (economic, sociological, ideological), will have constituted an absolute apprenticeship of the world.

                                                                – Jacky Goldberg[8]

With Mission to Mars and Femme Fatale De Palma’s cinema now reflects the wisdom of age, a newfound spiritual development akin to Carl Th. Dreyer in his final film Gertrud (1964). . . . With Femme Fatale the director returns to a favorite genre (the thriller), which has of late become a cinematic bastion for cynicism, and finds in it the possibility for redemption. The spirituality of De Palma’s cinema is rarely remarked on, perhaps because of the supposed tawdriness of the genres he works in. Nonetheless it is there, especially in the director’s death scenes—with their slowed down pace and focus on the character’s eyes, De Palma attempts to catch moments of soulful recognition.

                                                                – Keith Uhlich, 2003

I don’t believe essentially in letting people off the hook, letting good triumph or basically resolving things, because I think we live in an era in which things are unresolved and terrible events happen and you never forget them.

                                                                 – Brian De Palma

And this is why De Palma is so interesting as an action-film director, because what he presents is often the impossibility of action, the impossibility for a hero to act and intervene.

                                                                   – Adrian Martin

I find the above Keith Uhlich remarks from 2003 fascinating because, from the vantage point of 2020, it appears as though what he saw as a newfound spiritual development pretty much ceased after those two films. Could we not suggest that perhaps what stopped this spiritual development dead in its tracks was the Iraq War? De Palma, always the most political of the core New Hollywood filmmakers, had already expressed his deep horror and sadness over what America had done overseas way back in 1989 with the Vietnam-set Casualties of War—and, in 2007, was essentially forced to remake the film for the Iraq War era with Redacted. With Domino, more immediately political than any of his recent films besides Redacted, the anger and horror still flickers. (That the villain could just as easily be seen as Guy Pearce’s CIA man as the actual terrorists surely says something.) The film ends with a coda that offers no redemption but instead gives the last word to an image of terror. The final explosion has the same spirit about it as the scream that John Travolta inserts into the Z-horror film at the end of Blow-Out (1981). Nobody has won. The same could be said for the film’s personal elements as for its geopolitical ones, as the scene before which wraps up the characters’ stories is one of futility and pointlessness. The whole film is a tragic arc of sadness and impotence. Take first Coster-Waldau’s character: his impotence in the scene of Lars’ attack leads to his partner’s death, and then his guilt is there for the rest of the film, complicated by the revelation of Carice Van Houten’s relationship with Lars and his friendship with Lars’ widow. What is he chasing after? What is Van Houten chasing after? Revenge, essentially—and we know the futility of that even as she claims otherwise.

Domino in its entirety is a film about impotence—of the characters, of the world, of modern life. Nobody’s dreams come true, but their nightmares do. Not even De Palma himself can offer his characters redemption. It’s as if he is simply there to embrace them in their pain and present their story as a document of the tragedy and sadness of the modern world, of the chaos and absurdity in it. This is life now—an unresolved journey towards an undefined something, where “terrible events happen and you never forget them.” No more happy endings. And in this way De Palma fulfills the darkest and most terrible prophecy of Hitchcock’s Vertigo, that at the end we will all be left staring at a world where we have watched what we love get destroyed, if not by the world then by ourselves. Hollywood was the dream factory; De Palma’s cinema has become the death of the dream. But we aren’t left with complete hopelessness. For De Palma shows us, by the very act of filming and making films, that the extension of empathy and love is perhaps all we have left to combat the sadness and terror of the modern world. And maybe that’s enough.

---

[1] My translation. Original interview in French here, in Le Parisien.

[2] For an overview of Cahiers' relationship with De Palma’s work over the years, check out David Davidson’s invaluable work over at the Toronto Film Review: 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, a roundtable from 1981, and an interview with De Palma from 1982.

[3] From Positif no. 704, October 2019. My translation. Special thanks to David Davidson for access.

[4] Adapted from “Brian De Palma’s European Nightmare” at Filipe Furtado’s blog.

[5] Libération, 2019. My translation. Here.

[6] My translation. Original French here.

[7] My translation. Original French here.

[8] Les Inrockuptibles, 2019. My translation.