Brian De Palma enforces his 'Passion' to create again 'Love Crime'

Brian De Palma directs Rachel McAdams, left, and Noomi Repace in "Passion." 

Brian De Palma has been a compute of flash degree intensity and argument throughout his career, from his interlaced explorations of sex and violence in "Dressed to Kill," "Blow Out" and "Body Double" to such giddy popcorn landmarks as "Scarface," "The Untouchables" and "Mission: Impossible."

A true lover and student of movies, he is a steady presence at the Toronto International Film Festival whether he has a new film or not, but this year De Palma will be there to demonstrate his "Passion" just a few days after its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The movie is a remaking of Alain Corneau's 2010 French thriller "Love Crime," which starred Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier as a veteran executive and an up-and-comer locked into a dynamic of flirtation and manipulation that turns deadly.

Pauline Kael, composing about De Palma's 1976 film "Carrie" coincidentally enough itself being remade by Kimberly Peirce with Chloë Grace Moretz in the title role — declared the filmmaker as having "the wickedest baroque sensitivity at large in American movies." His movies come less frequently nowadays, but his sly sense of self address, his own heightened awareness of the Brian De Palma ness of a Brian De Palma film, hasn't abated with age, creating his take on someone else's film both a devilish thriller all its own and a fascinating study in manager authority. A masterful student of genre mechanics, De Palma this time tinkers under somebody else's hood.

The bones of both histories are by and large the same, as a more senior corporate executive (Rachel McAdams in "Passion") steals the credit for an idea from a fellow (Noomi Rapace in the remake). Both personal and professional intrigues abound, full of minor mortifications and major flirtations, bringing the simmering connection amongst the women to a boil as feelings erupt into dangerous actions. The story of who does what to whom and why is at once simple and complicated.

Perhaps De Palma's most famous change, he wrote the script with an "additional dialogue" credit to Natalie Carter, co writer with Corneau on the original film, is transforming the relationship amongst the women from a perverse mentorship in the ways of business and power into a fierce competitor by casting McAdams and Rapace in the roles. Where Thomas and Sagnier are classified in age by some 20 years, McAdams and Rapace are barely a year apart. He also repeatedly nudges the audience off balance with a teasing slippage amongst the film's reality and the dream life of Rapace's character.

"I saw there were many good matters about it, and I saw there were many things I thought I could improve," said De Palma, on the phone from Paris, where he has populated on and off in recent years in increase to New York, of his impression upon seeing "Love Crime" for the first time. "I think it's very difficult to, let's say, remake a classic. This had things that could be made better when you made over it."

Said Ben Said, producer of both "Love Crime" and "Passion," noted that for all its stylish De Palma esque intrigues, the filmmaker was never a address point on the original for the eclectic Corneau. Rather Corneau, who died in 2010 after completing "Love Crime," saw himself making a Patricia Highsmith story via Mike Nichols' "Working Girl."

"Granting to me, the movies, they don't tell the same story. The movies are really very different," said Saïd. "In Brian's movie you never know what they have in mind, what a dream is and what's reality, if they lie or if they tell the truth, they are both very manipulative, very dangerous. I think Brian brought all his compulsions to this movie."

"Passion," heading onto the festival circuit without U.S. distribution, was shot last spring in Berlin. Working with cameraman José Luis Alcaine, a frequent partner of Pedro Almodóvar's, De Palma not only makes his female leads look distinctively stunning but also shows a real affinity for modern architecture, dynamically shooting during a bank building designed by Frank Gehry. The film also characteristics a lush score by Italian composer Pino Donaggio, working with De Palma for the first time since 1992's "Raising Cain."

If De Palma was frequently charged of aping Alfred Hitchcock earlier in his career, he now has a style of glossy, gliding efficiency that can only be seen as all his own. His signature Steadicam, split-screen and split focus diaper shots are all present but in direct service of the storytelling.

"I don't think there's any doubt when you know you are in a Brian De Palma movie," Brian De Palma said with a sure sense of understated pride. "They're very different from Hitchcock movies, you are in it for 10 minutes and you know it's the way I do things, the way I look at things. If anything, whatever you can say about me, I've an real distinctive style and it's all through my work, whether it's 'Carlito's Way' or 'Carrie.' I have a certain way of visualizing things that are pure me."

Casting both his lead actresses somewhat against type, De Palma declared the interplay amongst Rapace and McAdams "lightning in a bottle." The pair met in real life while making "Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows," in which they both seem but had no scenes together.

McAdams, who concerned to her character, Christine, as "a bit of a succubus," acknowledged that she at first assumed she was up for the part of the young initiate developed by Ludivine Sagnier rather than Kristin Scott Thomas' role of the deceptive older executive.

"When I got the script and read it I thought I was playing the other character," McAdams said, "and then I spoke to Brian and he said he wanted me to play Christine, which I thought was kind of stimulating. I wouldn't have thought of that, so I thought it was a great adjustment that he made. It works the other way too, but this builds it a bit edgier."

De Palma says he has "laid back" in recent years, with "Passion" being his first film afterward the unusual docudrama "Redacted" in 2007 and the more straightforwardly De Palma ish "The Black Dahlia" in 2006 and "Femme Fatale" in 2002.

"I've done a lot of really nice movies and movies that people are still speaking about that are thirty or forty years old. I'm very happy with my career, and if I make a few other good ones, great," De Palma said. "I'm essentially just working because I enjoy it and it's what I do. I don't feel I have to prove anything to anybody."

He is working on another script with Carter, a remake of the 1986 Burt Reynolds taking a chance film" Heat set to star Jason Statham. So he's not done just yet.

"From my own study and earning as a director you need a tremendous amount of power and stamina to be able to make fine movies, I think any director who is over sixty, probably their best films are behind them. They may not desire to face up to it, but I think it's true."

Recognizing that he will soon turn 72 as well as his passion for his new "Passion," De Palma allowed, "Maybe I broke my own rule."