'PASSION' TRAILER MAKES ITS MARK
BALLET IN FILM APPEARS TO BE 'AFTERNOON OF A FAUN'The trailer for
Brian De Palma's
Passion popped up today, courtesy the
Toronto International Film Festival, where the film will screen next month. This is the most exciting trailer I've seen in a decade, when the French trailer for De Palma's
Femme Fatale made the rounds. With De Palma's name at the end punctuating those of
Rachel McAdams and
Noomi Rapace, the trailer is marked as one in a long line of De Palma "invitations," such as that of the
Dressed To Kill trailer. Instead of "From the director of
Scarface," the trailer makes no bones that this is a true blue De Palma film. At just over a minute, it's more of a teaser trailer, seemingly sans any
Pino Donaggio, but the brief flashes of images, shot by
José Luis Alcaine, look terrifically stylish, and I love the way the whole trailer turns on McAdams' delicious delivery of the line, "Hmmm... well now I want to be loved." Very much looking forward to seeing this film...~!
A shot in the trailer shows Rapace in front of a poster for the ballet, The Afternoon Of A Faun. Last May, we learned that instead of going to a movie, as she does in Love Crime, in Passion Rapace's character attends a ballet. It appears that the ballet is the appropriately erotic and scandalous Afternoon Of A Faun.
SOME COMMENTS ABOUT THE TRAILER FROM AROUND THE WEB
The Wall Street Journal
"Take a large portion of Basic Instinct, add a healthy helping of Eyes Wide Shut, mix in a bit of Wall Street, sprinkle on the last two 'Sherlock Holmes' female leads (Rachel McAdams, Noomi Rapace) and heat to the temperature of Body Double and what do you get? Maybe Brian De Palma’s latest film, Passion?"
Vulture
"Passion is Brian De Palma's remake of the recent French thriller Love Crime, but since this new teaser trailer is brief enough, we prefer to see the movie through our own specific lens: Obviously, this is a sequel to both Mean Girls and Prometheus. Noomi Rapace has clearly escaped the dangerous aliens and made her way to a lesbian business planet where Rachel McAdams, as Regina George, lives in exile. Very quickly, after a constant diet of corporate-training videos and sexually charged, Black Swan–themed slumber parties, Regina George is entrapping Noomi in devious mind games (watch out for her "So you agree?" and four-way phone-conversation gambits, Noomi!) and from then on, it's just a matter of time before they're stroking each others' faces and engaging in masked cunnilingus. Shut down the world! We have found the perfect movie."
Wired
"It’s not as crazy as the scene in Prometheus where Noomi Rapace’s character performs surgery on herself, but things do get kind of weird for the Swedish actress midway into the new trailer for Passion."
Jezebel
"If you're a Brian De Palma fan (and why wouldn't you be?), you know that a lot of his movies feature vaguely threatening women doing vaguely threatening things. Sometimes, those things are not always what they seem, WINK WINK (I'm winking, fyi), which means that there's a twist, or what M. Night Shyamalan would haughtily call a paradigm shift. There's no reason to suspect that De Palma's latest pyscho-sexual thriller, Passion, will be any different, as it features a gleefully self-centered Rachel McAdams and her lover (?), played by a strangely quiet Noomi Rapace. Intrigue and nakedness no doubt ensue."
Hollywood Outbreak
It takes a lot to wake me up from my emotional slumber, but I applaud the Toronto International Film Festival (let’s just call them TIFF) for giving me my daily cup of cinematic Joe with the Official Trailer to Brian De Palma’s new film Passion."
Rachel Fox
"My friend curated a selection of his own unique cocktails, all named after Brian de Palma films. Can't wait to tell him about PASSION. Yum!"
Movieline
"Watching the trailer for Brian De Palma's upcoming film Passion, I get the feeling that he could be a fan of SCTV's classic Whispers of the Wolf Ingmar Bergman parody. Yes, I know that De Palma's erotic thriller is based on the late Alain Corneau's final film Love Crime (2010), about two international business women locked in a power struggle — but there's something about Noomi Rapace's vacant stare in the first scenes of the trailer that reminds me of the great Andrea Martin's performance in the SCTV comedy gem. (You can see both videos after the jump.) And Rapace's co-star Rachel McAdams strikes me as a more vulpine version of the also-great Catherine O'Hara. I couldn't help but notice that both clips feature masks, by the way, although based on the contents of the sex drawer that gets opened in the Passion trailer, De Palma's movie is going to be way kinkier than anything that ever ran on Count Floyd's Monster Chiller Horror Theater."