Femme Fatale: Cinema's Most Unforgettable Lethal Ladies

by Ursini, James

  Catherine Zeta-Jones demonstrates her unnerving femme fatale stare.

  Gwen (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and Eddie (John Cusack), America’s sweethearts, at least on screen, from America’s Sweethearts.

  In 1995, Zeta-Jones took on the role of Catherine the Great for international television. Much like Dietrich’s rendering of that historical figure in The Scarlet Empress in 1934, Zeta-Jones hits the right notes by foregrounding Catherine’s proto-feminist credentials as a strong leader of her people while allowing the audience to see the emotional and sexual side of the woman as well. The next year the actress shifted gears and played the comic-strip aviatrix Sala from Lee Falk’s The Phantom. She initially sides with the villain Xander Drax and seduces the hero Kit Walker—the Phantom. But later she has a change of heart and helps Walker.

  The 1999 film Entrapment demonstrates Zeta-Jones’s ability to hold her own onstage against the most iconic of actors. In this case, she plays a high-tech cat burglar, Virginia, who has so many layers of cover that both audience and the other characters are unsure of her loyalties until the final frames. Working for an insurance agency, she wangles an assignment that entails trapping the legendary thief Mac (Sean Connery). In the quasi-erotic power play between Mac and Virginia, Zeta-Jones has an ease around the intimidating and by then legendary Connery which allows the audience to believe that her character would be able to deceive this veteran thief, if only temporarily.

  Velma (Catherine Zeta-Jones) glorying in the worship of men, a musical number from Chicago.

  The scenes in which Mac trains Virginia in his castle in the Scottish highlands have a tension which adds credibility to both the suspense and the unlikely romance (considering the decades-long age difference; as an interesting life-imitates-art side note, Zeta-Jones married actor Michael Douglas, who was also her senior by decades). Even though Mac has rules about partners and a distrust of women (when he invades her hotel room, she lies on the bed naked in defiance of his glare), the duplicitous Virginia manages to penetrate his façade by proving her ability during their training sessions and by verbally castigating him when she believes he is unreasonable. For Virginia is confident in her abilities, both as a femme fatale and as an accomplished thief. (Mac: “Has there ever been anyone you couldn’t manipulate, beguile, or seduce?” Virginia: “No.”)

  By the final heist of the film, Mac is in love, staring at the curve of her full hip, making love to her gently even though he knows she might turn him in to the police. In the final scene of the movie, when it is revealed that Mac was working for the FBI to in fact trap Virginia, he allows her to take his gun and escape on the train.

  In Stephen Frears’s dark comedy High Fidelity (2000), Zeta-Jones portrays Charlie Nicholson, one of the narrator’s first loves. She is a stunning coed (“She was dramatic ... she was exotic”) who dominates every scene she is in. As the narrator tells the audience, she lectures endlessly to her friends about subjects consequential and inconsequential. She expects devotion from lovers. In one scene after the narrator (John Cusack) has taken to dating her, she leads him up the stairs dropping her clothes behind her, which he stumbles to pick up. When she grows bored with him, she drops him for a new man and flaunts him and herself, half-nude, in the window as the narrator stands outside in the rain.

  In America’s Sweethearts (2001), Zeta-Jones lets her comic diva loose in this tale of a famous on and off-screen romantic couple—Gwen (Zeta-Jones) and Eddie (John Cusack)—who break up when Gwen takes up with her Spanish costar. Eddie, unable to handle the emotional blow, goes berserk, running his motorcycle into a restaurant where the couple are dining. He ends up in a mental institution. When fans begin to clamor for Gwen and Eddie to be together again, the studio orders publicity agent Lee (Billy Crystal) to fake a romance between the couple for public consumption. Eddie, however, is still obsessed Gwen who treats him, as well as everyone else around her, like servants.

  Catherine Zeta-Jones finally was rewarded by her peers for her femme fatale performances in 2002. She played the murderous vamp Velma Kelly in Bob Fosse’s Chicago. Zeta-Jones was able to display her dancing and singing skills (she had been a success in English stage musicals from the age of fourteen). In her final musical number with costar Renée Zellweger as Roxie Hart, another murdering vamp, both women are dressed to the nines in furs and jewels. As they sing of their victory over the law and society, they turn their prop tommy guns on the audience. The number is not only a vindication of these two specific deadly females but also of the femme fatale archetype as a whole.

  Marilyn (Catherine Zeta-Jones) holds the leash of her dog as she smiles and prepares to leash her next animal, the lovestruck Miles (George Clooney), from Intolerable Cruelty.

  In the Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty (2003), Zeta-Jones plays Marilyn, a “carnivore” who, by her own admission, “eats men alive.” After catching her “silly” rich husband Rex with his mistress, she sues him for divorce. Unfortunately for Marilyn, Rex (Edward Herrmann) hires slick and unscrupulous divorce lawyer Miles (George Clooney) to defend him. After revealing in court that Marilyn had planned all along to marry and divorce Rex for his money, she loses her suit.

  Marilyn moves into high gear and hires an actor to pretend to be a rich oilman, Doyle (Billy Bob Thornton), who wants to marry Marilyn. At Marilyn’s urging, they come to Miles for a prenuptial agreement to protect his fortune. Miles has already been captured by Marilyn’s cool beauty (he asked her out for dinner when he was representing Rex) and becomes further perplexedwith this new move by his distant diva. When the phony marriage between Doyle and Marilyn dissolves, Miles finds an opening to declare his love for Marilyn.

  A glamour photo of Catherine Zeta-Jones.

  Miles meets her again in Las Vegas where he is attending a divorce lawyers’ convention. She descends the stairs of the casino in a red dress, leading a designer dog by a diamond leash. That night he proposes and they marry. He is so enamored that he rips up the prenuptial, which she had proposed he sign. Before he can return to Los Angeles, Marilyn has moved into his house and filed for divorce. Miles falls apart emotionally and professionally; and, in his hysterical state, he hires a hitman to eliminate Marilyn. The hitman bungles the job and ends up killing himself instead.

  Marilyn and Miles meet to negotiate a divorce, across the same negotiations table where Miles had first become infatuated with Marilyn. Instead of divorcing, they reconcile (this is after all romantic comedy which necessitates a happy ending), although one is never quite convinced this marriage will last any longer than the others Marilyn has been party to.

  Emmanuelle Béart

  —The Dark Angel

  French actor Emmanuelle Béart came to the world’s attention through two films in which she played characters who mixed the angelic with the demonic: Manon of the Spring (1986) and Date with an Angel (1987). Her ethereal yet sensual beauty made her a perfect choice for both. But it was her neurotic sexuality, stubbornness, and keen intelligence which gave her the edge which tipped these characters into the femme fatale category.

  In Manon of the Spring, a sequel to Jean de Florette, Béart plays the title character, a child of nature who dances nude in the fields of Provence while tending to her flock. But this sprite of nature has a dark side. When she learns who is responsible for the death of her hunchback father, she sets out silently but menacingly to exact her revenge. She tantalizes Ugolin (Daniel Auteuil) with her nudity and her ephemeral nature as he chases her madly through the forest. The final coup de grace occurs in front of the town when Manon rejects him coldly. He commits suicide. For the rest of the town, most of whom were involved in the persecution of her father, she has a special form of punishment. She stops up the secret source of water to the town, leaving the villagers high and dry.

  In Date with an Angel, Béart, appropriately enough, portrays a wounded angel who falls to earth and right into the life of boring and conventional Jim Sanders (Michael E. Knight). Her needs as a “fish out of water” cause a sei
smic disruption in his life, particularly as he is to be married shortly. Although Béart radiates innocence in the film, as she did in Manon, her disruption of Sanders’s world and her appearance at the end as the angel of death, sent to summon Sanders, gives the character an edge, even if it is very thin one.

  Director Claude Sautet’s Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud (1995) delves into a favorite theme of the director: emotional detachment. Both Arnaud (Michel Serrault) and Nelly (Béart) are characters who keep others at a distance while using them for their purposes. The retired Arnaud meets the self-possessed beauty Nelly in a café. Fascinated by her and learning of her financial difficulties, he offers to pay her expenses. She accepts his offer of help and also agrees to type up his memoirs for him.

  Arnaud tries to manipulate Nelly by cross-examining her in an almost prurient manner about her affairs. Nelly resists this power play and instead seizes the initiative by questioning him about his own distant relationships with his wife and children. She also begins critiquing his memoirs, rather than just mindlessly typing them up. Arnaud chafes at this young woman’s attempts to dominate him. In order to keep him in line, she begins an affair with his publisher, driving Arnaud into a fit of jealousy. Having put Arnaud in his place, she callously breaks up with the publisher and continues her work with the chastened Arnaud.

  As a modern feminist femme fatale, Nelly’s influence on Arnaud is positive as well as painful. Through her prodding about his life and her exploration of his emotions, she brings Arnaud to a kind of catharsis. He talks to her freely of the pain in his life, especially regarding his wife, and at the end of the film seems more open to the people around him.

  La répétition (2001), directed and written by Catherine Corsini, uses the character of Lulu, the protagonist of the famous play by Frank Wedekind and of G.W Pabst’s adaptation of it in 1928 (Pandora’s Box) starring Louise Brooks, as a central metaphor for the film. The main character of the film, the actress Nathalie (Béart), is playing Lulu in a modern version of the play. And as several of the characters in the movie tell her, it is a perfect part for her. For, like Lulu, she is a seductress, an egotist, and an innocent all in one. The story of the film, however, centers on the obsession of her childhood friend Louise (Pascale Bussières) with Nathalie.

  Emmanuelle Béart in one of her many photo shoots for magazines.

  Marlene/Nathalie (Emmanuelle Bèart) leads the bored housewife Catherine (Fanny Ardant) on an erotic adventure, from Nathalie.

  Their relationship spans decades and is sporadic at best, usually ending when Nathalie becomes tired of Louise’s possessiveness which she later calls “stifling.” But Louise cannot stay away from this magnetic woman. When Nathalie is conflicted over whether to leave her lover and director for a new more famous director, Louise runs to her side and helps her make the transition.

  When Nathalie becomes frightened and stuck in her performance as Lulu, Louise again abandons her spouse for the arms of Nathalie. Nathalie uses her as a confidante/gofer/lover but again Louise becomes jealous and obsessive. Nathalie responds by humiliating her in public (dismissing her proposal that they travel together to Italy curtly in front of her theater friends) and in private (bringing a lover home while she is having an affair with Louise). The relationship reaches critical mass when Nathalie suffers an attack of appendicitis. As Nathalie moans in pain in her bed, blaming Louise for her illness, the ambulance attendants ring the bell and pound on the door. But Louise refuses to answer the door, leaving Nathalie to crawl from her bed toward the entrance.

  Nathalie becomes a huge hit as Lulu. Her poster is plastered all over Paris. Louise, unable to break her fixation, begins an affair with Nathalie’s ex-lover. One night she and her lover see Nathalie walking on the streets as they drive by. Both are mesmerized by the sight, unable to express their feelings to each other as they watch their mutual obsession disappear up the street.

  The theme of Jacques Rivette’s amour fou ghost tale The Story of Marie and Julien (2003) is best described by star Emmanuelle Béart in her interview on the DVD release when she comments, “Desire awakens the body.” Julien (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) is a meticulous clocksmith who meets a beautiful and mysterious woman, Marie (Béart), and then loses contact with her. Over the next year, he dreams of her repeatedly, often in the most violent settings (meeting her in a park where she raises a knife to stab him). Even though he suspects that she will “hurt [him]” somehow, he still yearns for her.

  One day Julien’s prayers are answered and he meets her again but she has changed. Although she agrees almost immediately to move in with him and to help him in his scheme to blackmail Madame X, who is involved with murder and industrial espionage, she begins to exhibit bizarre behavior that frightens Julien. She falls into trance states where she speaks as if reading from a script, and then does not remember what she has said. During their intense lovemaking she seems to channel, with his participation, past lives: “I’m a warrior. I come on top of you. I eat you until I am sick.” She also has periods of distance when she alarms him by declaring there is an abyss between them, and retreats to an attic room which she redecorates compulsively.

  Julien, however, cannot let go of her, even when she disappears altogether without warning. Suspicious, he begins to investigate Marie’s past and finds, to his shock, that she had committed suicide last year. He visits the room she died in and finds that it is decorated exactly like the one in his attic. Even this information, however, does not deter Julien. He returns to her, accepting the supernatural fact that she is a ghost, for as he tells a friend: “All I know is I need her in a way that is vital.” Intent on preventing her from “reliving” her death, he tells her he will live with her “day by day,” and that if she leaves he will follow her by killing himself. He tries to prove it by cutting himself with a knife. Marie cuts herself as well, showing him how she cannot bleed, how she can never really be human again.

  Taking pity on Julien in his angst, Marie uses her powers to freeze time and return to another dimension where she can watch him although he will not see her or remember her. But in observing Julien go about his day with a vague sense of sadness and loss, she begins to cry and the tears fall onto the cut she had made. She looks at her arm in amazement as blood begins to flow from the wound. And now she realizes that her body has now been awakened by her passion, by her sexual desire, by her love. She becomes human once more. In a whimsical and ironic ending, she reappears to Julien who still suffers from a loss of memory. “I am Marie, the one you love.” “I doubt it, Miss.” “That’s what you think. Just give me a little time.” And so Rivette winds up his ghost story on a fairytale note, allowing his couple a second chance at love.

  Julien (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) tries to hold onto this “wild thing,” Marie (Emmanuelle Béart), who has taken over his life, from The Story of Marie and Julien.

  Nathalie (2003), directed by Anne Fontaine, is about the sexual liberation of a repressed, detached doctor—Catherine (Fanny Ardant)—by a liberated if somewhat manipulative sex trade worker named Marlene (the allusion to Marlene Dietrich is obvious). Catherine’s marriage is on the rocks. Although her husband, Bernard (Gerard Depardieu), still loves her, he is alienated by her detachment and so has affairs.

  Catherine decides to experience what her husband does by hiring a performer in a sex club to seduce her husband and report every detail back to her. By seeing love and sex through his eyes, Catherine thinks she might understand what he is feeling while controlling the situation through the performer. However, she did not expect that the woman she chose—Marlene (who she renames Nathalie)—to be such a free agent.

  The not-so-innocent angel of vengeance Manon (Emmanuelle Béart), from Manon of the Spring.

  Refusing to actually seduce the husband, Nathalie instead leads Catherine on, seducing her with the erotic details of her supposed affair. Catherine finds Nathalie addictive. She rents her an apartment and even begins to be jealous when she has clients over. She visits her at the sex club and w
atches surreptitiously as she lap dances with men. When Nathalie catches her and gives her the Béart trademark pout, Catherine turns and flees.

  As in Nelly & Monsieur Arnaud, Béart’s character, even though selfish and deceptive, is a liberating force. When she finally reveals to Catherine that there never was an affair, the doctor is almost relieved. By that time she has opened up considerably. The sadness in her face has dissipated. In the final scene, she walks hand-in-hand with her husband, hinting at a possible reconciliation.

  The Four Musketeers, a.k.a. D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers (2005), allows Béart to play Dumas’s classic femme fatale Milady, with a twist. This femme fatale has demonic powers. So not only can she seduce the musketeers with her charms but she can also blow them to hell, literally.

  Béart delivers that femme fatale pout which helps create her child/woman femme fatale image.

  The object of worship, Daniela (Monica Bellucci), in How Much Do You Love Me?

  Monica Bellucci

  —The Mother and the Whore

  Italian model and actress Monica Bellucci has in many of her femme fatale parts worked variations of the mother-and-the-whore stereotype, a stereotype still thriving in Catholic countries like Italy. Utilizing her mysterious Mona Lisa gaze and her voluptuous and often nude body, she has turned the expectations of the audience, particularly those of the males in that audience, on its head time and time again.