Femme Fatale: Cinema's Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies

by Ursini, James

  In Miles’s luxurious apartment, Sandra taunts him about his failing business and his aging body. When he begins to approach her from behind in an amorous embrace, she turns from his grasp and expertly removes his belt and slips it around his neck, choking him while crouching over him like an animal and simultaneously masturbating him. Turned on by her rough sex and still obsessed with her, Miles refuses to let her leave and beats her. Sandra retaliates by carrying out the secret mission that she had almost aborted by handcuffing him as if in preparation for an erotic encounter. But she then shoots him execution-style repeatedly in the back of the head before running from the scene.

  We later learn that Sandra was hired by two international smugglers—Lester (Carl Ng) and Sue (Kelly Lin)—to assassinate Miles. In love with Lester, Sandra agrees to the mission even though she still steals heroin from him in order to raise some more money for herself (an act that he finds out about and forgives). Sue pretends to ignore her husband’s affair but has other plans.

  Argento as Vellini, the tempestuous spurned mistress, in The Last Mistress, a.k.a. The Old Mistress.

  As Madame Du Barry, Argento clings to her king (Rip Torn) as a symbol of her arduous climb to power,from Marie Antoinette.

  Vellini (Argento), excited by her lover’s (Fu’ad Ait Aattou) sacrifice in a duel, prepares to drink his blood, in The Last Mistress, a.k.a. The Old Mistress.

  Lester sends Sandra to Hong Kong where she is to obtain a new passport and meet him to start a new life. Arriving in Hong Kong, matters worsen as Sandra is kidnapped and an attempt is made on her life. Sue steps in, ostensibly, to help her—but her real motive is to keep Sandra away from Lester.

  Sue drugs her and Sandra awakens in another international smuggler’s country house. There she is given money, documents, and a plane ticket for Shanghai. But the spurned Sandra has one more mission. She tracks Lester and then follows him, a pocketknife in her hand. As he waits for a car, she opens the knife and moves toward his neck. But she cannot bring herself to harm the man she loved and instead turns around and leaves as the camera goes out of focus, leaving Sandra to her own ambiguous future.

  The Old Mistress, a.k.a. The Last Mistress (2008), director Catherine Breillat’s detached tale of amour fou (there are layers of narration which mediate between the audience and the emotional content of the film) in the Brontë mode (Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre), stars Argento as the passionate and unrelenting courtesan Vellini, the ex-mistress of the handsome libertine Marigny (Fu’ad Ait Aattou). Marigny falls into a tempestuous relationship with the often violent and extravagant (sexually and materially) Spanish divorcee Vellini. In his quest to possess her he goes to great extremes, at one point apprehending her on horseback and attempting to kiss her. When Vellini strikes him in the face with her riding crop he is only more aroused, brazenly asking her to brand him with a second mark. But the incident is witnessed by her jealous husband.

  Marigny submits to fighting a duel with her husband in which he refrains from killing the older man for her sake, but instead takes a shot in the chest himself. Like a true daughter of a matador that she is, Vellini shoves the young man’s surgeon out of the way so that she can lick the blood from his wound with a look of victorious ecstasy on her face. Vellini is soon unable to resist any longer; she surrenders to her desires for the martyred lover and begins to visit him daily during his convalescence, where she locks him up in his room like a prisoner. “Later you will be my slave,” she says teasingly, and departs to her home to calmly dismiss her aristocratic husband from her life. The old man falls to the floor in a crumpled heap, crying and begging, but the only answer he receives from his Spanish wife is a brusque “adios!”

  After the tragic death of the daughter they bore together in Algeria, and long years of an emotionally draining relationship with the insatiable Vellini, the two part amicably and pursue casual affairs with others while remaining friends. Hoping to put his financial affairs in order, Marigny takes matters a step further. He becomes engaged to and then marries the beautiful and rich Hermangarde (Roxane Mesquida), the toast of Paris. He attempts to say his last goodbye to his mistress that he believes he no longer loves, but Vellini will not be shunted aside. She advises him that without a doubt he will be back despite his intentions to be faithful to his innocent and frigid young wife. Marigny moves far away from Paris in order to escape any temptation Vellini might generate.

  However, Vellini, determined to reassert her power over her longtime lover, follows the couple to their hideaway; and, like Catherine in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, she haunts the hills and the shore around their palatial home, drawing the reluctant but emotionally and sexually bound Marigny back to her. Their love scenes are, as in most of Breillat’s films, graphic and tactile. Their lovemaking alternates between violence and tenderness. In addition, the gender roles are often blurred as the actor playing Marigny has strong feminine features and Argento demonstrates, as is her wont, aggressive, traditionally male tactics in her sexual approach. In their final sex scene together, Marigny appears as a limp ragdoll, being roughly used like a toy by Vellini as he stares into space, resigned to his shameful fate.

  The fierce Olympias (Angelina Jolie) tries to inspire her son Alexander (Colin Farrell) to defy his father and seize the throne, from Alexander.

  Angelina Jolie

  —The Greatest Mother of Them All

  Angelina Jolie has managed throughout her career to choose roles that express her various personalities. From wild, bisexual bad girl through sexually charged warrior woman to commanding mother figure, Jolie has left her strong imprint on the new millennium femme fatale.

  When in 1996 at the age of twenty, Jolie as “Legs” Sadovsky unexpectedly enters the school halls and then the biology classroom in Foxfire (the camera underlining her power by dramatically panning up from her boots, across her leather jacket to her face framed by a boyish haircut—emphasizing her androgynous qualities), frees a frog from its pins, and then jumps out the window, both the students in the school and the audience in the theater know they have witnessed the appearance of a powerful and magnetic individual destined to leave her idiosyncratic tattoo on the archetype of the femme fatale.

  Jolie’s role as “Legs,” the charismatic leader of a gang of middle-class girls who avenge wrongs at their high school, is a rough draft for her more famous role as Lisa in Girl, Interrupted. While Legs is far more positive in her approach to “girl power” and Lisa more destructive, they both share traumatic backgrounds and a defiance of all authority, particularly of the male variety. In this film, Legs leads the girls in a physical attack on a science teacher who has molested students. She oversees a bonding session involving tattoos, and finally leads a dangerous abduction of the abused Goldie’s (Jenny Shimizu, in real life Jolie’s lover) father.

  Secret agent Mrs. Smith (Angelina Jolie) as a dominatrix about to terminate her slave’s session, from Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

  Julia/Bonny (Jolie) lights her cigar, a symbol of her phallic power in Original Sin.

  The femme fatale role that garnered Jolie her first slew of acting awards was as the 1970s-1980s supermodel Gia Carangi in the 1998 cable movie of the same name. As portrayed by Jolie, Gia is a needy, tormented model whose psychological dysfunction coupled with heavy drug use led to her premature demise from AIDS in 1986. The film depicts her push-pull relationship with the people who loved her, including her mother, her lovers (both male and female), and her employers. She always feared abandonment but created untenable situations, often violent ones, which forced those who loved her to separate from her.

  In Girl, Interrupted (1999) Jolie’s Lisa, as mentioned earlier, is the queen bitch of the psychiatric ward at Claymore Hospital near Boston. She intimidates all the other female patients with her teasing sexuality, violent temper, and brutally honest criticisms. The timid Susanna (Winona Ryder), the newest patient, becomes morbidly fascinated by Lisa’s lack of inhibition. Whether teasing a soda jerk at a local restaurant with h
er tongue and double entendres, or battering down the fortress of lies which another patient—Daisy (Brittany Murphy)—has constructed to hide her sexual relationship with her father (an act which leads to the girl’s suicide), Lisa becomes the focus of not only Susanna’s life at Claymore, but almost everyone else’s as well.

  Lisa (Angelina jolie), the patient who rules the roost in Girl, Interrupted.

  In the end, in an ironic twist, it is the destructive Lisa who becomes the liberating agent in Susanna’s recovery. After the death of Daisy, Susanna loses her fear of Lisa and does her own bit of truth-telling. In a final emotional confrontation, Susanna rips away Lisa’s own “tough girl” façade and reveals the insecure and lonely woman lurking beneath.

  In 2001 writer/director Michael Cristofer reunited with star Jolie, whom he had collaborated on with Gia, to adapt Cornell Woolrich’s noir novel Waltz into Darkness, this time called Original Sin. The filmmakers maintained the sexual power of Woolrich’s femme fatale in all her perversity, but also, in a typically post-feminist move, gave her control of the narrative.

  The Julia/Bonnie of Original Sin is, like her predecessor in the novel, a sexually charged, cigar-chomping seductress who delights in her power over men. To the Colonel who is courting her in the second half of the film, she is a dominatrix who makes him beg outside her door and dismisses him with a threatening wave of her cane. To her lover and criminal accomplice Billy, she indulges her sadomasochistic urges—which include blood-drinking, cutting, and rough sex. To her duped husband Luis (Antonio Banderas), she is “the death” of him, someone he “can’t live without.”

  Grendel’s mother (Angelina Jolie), the seductive creature who fights the invader kings,from Beowulf.

  The film opens on Bonnie’s close-up in prison (this framing device and the twist ending are two major changes made to the novel) as she narrates the story: “This is not a love story. This is a story of love and the power it has over life ... the power to heal or to destroy.” When she arrives in Cuba (the movie is set in the late nineteenth century) to marry her coffee magnate Luis, she initially takes on the more demure façade of the real mail-order bride Julia (who has been murdered), but soon discards that and reveals the sexually charged woman beneath.

  After her theft of Luis’s money, Bonnie returns to the life of a courtesan and card shark. When Luis tracks her down, after losing himself in the flesh of prostitutes who resembled her, she easily turns him back into her lover by placing the barrel of his gun against her partially revealed breasts. Luis collapses emotionally and physically, unable to resist her appeal: “Don’t you see I can’t live without you?”

  From that point on Luis demonstrates his willingness to love her unconditionally, although often intermingled with great angst: “If I ever lost you, there would be nothing left for me.” He murders (or thinks he does), cheats at cards, evades the law, and submits to her cuckolding of him with her ex-lover Billy. He even gladly accepts death at her hands and drinks the poison she offers him.

  Luis (Antonio Banderas) lost in the sensual power the duplicitous Bonny (Angelina Jolie) holds over him, from Original Sin.

  However, the filmmakers of Original Sin do take mercy on their fugitive couple. Bonnie is sentenced to death for the murder of Billy. She escapes by seducing an innocent monk to whom she tells her story (the framing device of the movie). In the final scene she is radiant again, draped in an expensive gown and sporting brilliant jewelry. She walks around a table of gamblers, pouring them drinks as she signals to Luis, using a code to indicate the hands of the other men. In a final close-up, she smiles and runs her finger across her throat, signaling on one level a dangerous hand while at the same time expressing to the audience the danger of her character.

  Oliver Stone’s epic Alexander, based on the life of the conqueror Alexander the Great, is a turning point for Jolie. By this time the actor had abandoned the bad-girl antics of her youth and was now a humanitarian, giving a large portion of her salary to causes, particularly those dealing with refugee children. In addition, she began adopting children from various parts of the world as well as giving birth to several of her own.

  In her role as the controlling mother of Alexander, Olympias, Jolie begins her investigation which continues to this day of the dark and light sides of motherhood. Olympias centers all her love and ambition on her son Alexander (Colin Farrell). She is estranged from her brutal Macedonian husband Philip (Val Kilmer), who balks at her dark and independent nature.

  In one particularly revealing scene, Olympias enters the bed of her young son with a snake and teaches him to love it and not to be afraid, wrapping the snake around him. She then sleeps with her son (the incestuous overtones are none too subtle) while her vicious husband battles in the games outside. Later Olympias directs her son’s ambitions, inspiring him to defy his father in order to gain the throne. (“In my womb I carried my avenger.”) When he resists her directions, she seduces him back with the promise of her bed. He gradually submits, falling to his knees and placing his hands on her lap. (Olympias: “You shall rule the world.”)

  In Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005), Jolie and her husband-to-be Brad Pitt play a middle-class married couple who are in therapy to try to salvage their emotionless and sexless relationship. Bored by their suburban surroundings and friends, the two find fulfillment in their jobs as secret agents/assassins, jobs they hide from each other. In one comic scene, we see Mrs. Smith dressed and acting as a dominatrix to a willing client whom she first scolds, then eliminates, by breaking his neck. She then runs home to exchange her vinyl and leather costume for demure housewife garb. The plot twists and turns when the two are finally assigned the same target. Through their competition the couple finally finds the passion and sexual excitement they so craved, as sex and violence make a volatile cocktail for this bored couple.

  In Beowulf (2007), the motion capture CGI version of the Old English myth, Jolie plays another devious mother, this time of the mutant Grendel. A half-human, half amphibious creature, she seduces the human king—Hrothgar (Anthony Hopkins)—who had invaded her terrain. Giving birth to Grendel, she sends her son on raids against the king and his army. Returning wounded, she comforts her son like a doting mother but still sends him off again to battle.

  Angelina Jolie displays her tattoos, a symbol of her femme fatale status on and off the screen.

  An egotistical champion, Beowulf (Ray Winstone), appears on the scene and promises to kill Grendel. He succeeds but when he enters the cave of the monster, he finds himself confronted by the seductive, half-human mother. With her sensual body rhythms and honeyed voice, Grendel’s mother seduces yet another weak king. After reigning for decades as king, the mother once again sends out a son, his son, in the form of a dragon to kill his father and decimate his men. Beowulf defends his fortress, destroying his son and giving up his own life in the process. He passes his throne onto his faithful friend, who stands at the edge of the water. Soon he too is transfixed as the beautiful mother rises from the sea once more and seems to beckon to him to repeat the cycle of death and rebirth.

  Catherine Zeta-Jones

  —Determination and Glamour Has Its Rewards

  Catherine Zeta-Jones, along with Angelina Jolie, is probably one of the few actors in this chapter who could be considered a bona fide A-list movie star. She, like Angelina Jolie, radiates a charisma as well as a haughty glamour in her performances, which are the mark of a modern femme fatale of the star variety.

  Zeta-Jones began developing her femme fatale persona in British television. In 1994, the BBC brought to the small screen an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel Return of the Native. With her dark looks and statuesque figure Zeta-Jones perfectly incarnates Eustacia Vye, the “witch” of Wessex. From the first shots of her, wrapped in her long, hooded cloak, striding in a traditionally masculine manner across the heath, the viewer senses a strength of character typical of many Hardy heroines. As she reaches the top of a hill, she finally turns to face the camera and pronounce
s her first line: “Deliver my heart from this fearful, lonely place. Send me a great love from somewhere or I shall die.”

  Eustacia is a pariah in her village, considered a sorcerer as much for her independent manner as her bewitching effect on the local men—including her doting grandfather, her unofficial young “servant” who she rewards by allowing him to touch her hand for “five minutes,” and her lovers, Damon and Clym. In church she is even stabbed by one of the female villagers in an attempt to counter a spell she believes Eustacia is capable of casting. Whether a witch or not, there is little doubt that she does beguile men.

  Damon (Clive Owen) cannot marry his betrothed until Eustacia sets him free. Eustacia does release him but only after she sets her sights on the returning native of the title: Clym Yeobright (Ray Stevenson), who has the aura of the wider world around him. Clym too falls under her spell when she appears to him like a “fairy” out of the fog, caressing a white horse. He showers her with gifts, gently combs out her long black hair, and caresses her gloves when she is away.

  Eustacia marries Clym, but as soon as he has her contained within his small world, he reneges on his promise of travel to Paris. When fate steps in, as it does in most of Hardy’s works, and blinds Clym, Eustacia is trapped once again. Out of restless desperation, she reignites her affair with Damon. Hoping to leave this “fearful, lonely place” once and for all, she asks Damon to take her by carriage to the nearest large town. Fate, however, reappears again and they are stopped by Clym, Damon’s wife, and the peasant Diggory. Standing on the bridge in a storm, Eustacia stares disconsolately at the rapids below and departs from Wessex the only way she now believes she can, through suicide.